Windows self-hosted runners

Windows self-hosted runners for GitHub Actions are available since v2.4.0.

RunsOn Windows runners are ~10x cheaper than the official GitHub Actions Windows runners (for instance when using the m7i family).

Pricing

Default images

You can opt into a specific image by setting the image label in your workflow.

x64

To use them, you need to reference the image you want to use and an instance family that supports Windows:

jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: runs-on=${{ github.run_id }}/image=windows22-full-x64/family=m7i

Example

name: Windows

on:
  workflow_dispatch:

jobs:
  default:
    runs-on: runs-on=${{ github.run_id }}/image=windows22-full-x64/family=m7i
    steps:
      - name: Checkout
        uses: actions/checkout@v6
      - name: Check current dir and env variables
        run: |
          dir .
          echo $env:USERNAME
          echo $env:RUNS_ON_RUNNER_NAME
      - name: Logs
        run: |
          Get-Content -Path "C:\runs-on\output.log"
      - name: Users
        run: |
          Get-LocalUser | Format-Table -AutoSize Name,Enabled,PasswordLastSet

Inspecting agent logs

On Windows runners, the output of the RunsOn agent is stored in the C:\runs-on\output.log file.

Those logs are also shipped to the CloudWatch log group for EC2 instances.

Limitations

• Windows runners are quite slow to boot (~1min currently for base images, ~2-3min for full images). Using warm pools can help reduce this to under 20-30 seconds.
• Hyper-V-dependent workloads require explicitly opting into nested-virt on supported x64 families such as m8i. Existing stacks must be upgraded before nested-virtualization jobs can launch, and arm64 runners are not supported for this feature.
• Some legacy or easily available through actions software has been removed to ensure faster boot times and lower disk usage.