Welcome to GARM!

Garm enables you to create and automatically maintain pools of self-hosted GitHub runners, with autoscaling that can be used inside your github workflow runs.

The goal of GARM is to be simple to set up, simple to configure and simple to use. It is a single binary that can run on any GNU/Linux machine without any other requirements other than the providers it creates the runners in. It is intended to be easy to deploy in any environment and can create runners in any system you can write a provider for. There is no complicated setup process and no extremely complex concepts to understand. Once set up, it's meant to stay out of your way.

Garm supports creating pools on either GitHub itself or on your own deployment of GitHub Enterprise Server. For instructions on how to use GARM with GHE, see the credentials section of the documentation.

Whether you're running into issues or just want to drop by and say "hi", feel free to join us on slack.

Check out the quickstart document for instructions on how to install GARM. If you'd like to build from source, check out the building from source document.

External providers are binaries that GARM calls into to create runners in a particular IaaS. There are currently two external providers available:

• OpenStack
• Azure

Follow the instructions in the README of each provider to install them.

The GARM configuration is a simple toml. The sample config file in the testdata folder is fairly well commented and should be enough to get you started. The configuration file is split into several sections, each of which is documented in its own page. The sections are:

• The default section
• Database
• Github credentials
• Providers
• Metrics
• JWT authentication
• API server

If you would like to optimize the startup time of new instance, take a look at the performance considerations page.

The providers are interfaces between GARM and a particular IaaS in which we spin up GitHub Runners. These providers can be either native or external. The native providers are written in Go, and must implement the interface defined here. External providers can be written in any language, as they are in the form of an external executable that GARM calls into.

There is currently one native provider for LXD and two external providers for Openstack and Azure.

If you want to write your own provider, you can choose to write a native one, or implement an external one. The easiest one to write is probably an external provider. Please see the Writing an external provider document for details. Also, feel free to inspect the two available external providers in this repository.