As part of of my homelab journey, I wanted to build a CI/CD pipeline for my apps and wanted to use the GitHub self-hosted runners.

There are basically two installation options: as a stand-alone system, or inside a Kubernetes cluster. I eventually decided to deploy it in my Kubernetes cluster I already had running(more specifically, a K3s cluster), so the runners would spin up on demand and there was no need to have a dedicated VM for that(didn’t like the idea of installing it in a shared VM with other service/s either)

Recently I submitted a PR which just got merged, for k8s-ruby, a ruby client for the Kubernetes API, to implement the Pod#Create Connect Exec endpoint, which allows to execute arbitrary commands inside a pod container, including opening a shell session.

Eventually It wasn’t that hard to make it work but there were some interesting learnings along the way: