If you’re using Actions Runner Controller, the provided base image may not be enough. In fact, it’s important to build your own to ensure that you have all the dependencies you need for your workflows.

Minimizing network activity improves your build times, speeds up builds, and reduces costs. With ARC, you rely on multiple Actions steps in your workflow. What if you could avoid needing to download your most frequently used Actions? This post walks you through creating images with an Actions archive cache to eliminate those downloads.

If you’re going to build custom images for ARC or standalone VM runners, then you probably want to take some time to preload it with the tools that matter to your builds. If you want that process to work well for the GitHub-provided tools and actions/setup- Actions, then you’ll want to know how to prepopulate the runner’s tool cache.

Working with containers, one concept that seems to always confuse developers and administrators is layers. Despite the elegance and simplicity of the design, they are still a black box to most teams. In this post, I’ll explain how they work conceptually and the basis of their implementation.

Want to reduce how long it takes to get your Dev Container started? Take advantage of some advanced caching techniques!