Disabling Default GitHub-Hosted Runners

[niklasheld]

Why are you starting this discussion?

Product Feedback

What GitHub Actions topic or product is this about?

Actions Runner

Discussion Details

We have an issue with GitHub actions, specifically that we can't find a way to fully disable the public GitHub-hosted runners, e.g. such as ubuntu-latest. Our use-case is to restrict internet-access of GitHub workflows in our organizations by only allowing GitHub-hosted runners in our Azure VNET behind a firewall.

We were initially able to work around this missing feature by specifying SKU-level budgets of $0.00 on every relevant SKU that maps to any of the default GitHub runners. Unfortunately we noticed that this doesn't work reliably since runner costs that are included in the monthly allotment within our enterprise are not blocked. It is also sort of bothersome to configure this number of budgets for all relevant organizations in our enterprise.

A previous discussion about this topic has been closed with a response that this feature was expected to be available earlier this year, however I can't find any announcements or new features regarding this.

In my opinion it is really disappointing and honestly a security issue that this feature is still missing, especially in the light of security incidents such as the Shai-Hulud-malware that used GitHub Actions workflows with access to the internet as means of exfiltration!
Are there any news or insights into the GitHub roadmap regarding this topic?

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[sheplu]

+1 on this feature. It would be great to be able to block / remove the default runner.
I also have this use case with restricting access to internet, but also forcing specific version / compute capabilities.

[jackmtpt]

We were able to get GitHub support to set the hosted runner concurrency to 0 for us via the controls they have in the backend. Our use-case is to restrict internet-access of GitHub runners by running the GitHub-hosted runners in our Azure VNET, and now that support have disabled the internet-connected runners this is possible - the only runners that our actions can use are the custom ones using our network.

[Jamonygr]

For this security model, budgets are not a strong control because included minutes can still let jobs run. The closest practical setup is what another commenter mentioned: ask GitHub Support to set hosted runner concurrency to zero for the default hosted runners, then only allow your approved runner groups that use Azure VNet private networking. I would also add ruleset or workflow policy checks so repositories cannot quietly switch back to ubuntu-latest. The product really needs a first-class "disable default hosted runners" switch, but support-side concurrency plus runner group policy is the cleanest workaround I have seen.