Self-hosted CI runners

Your dedicated Mac makes an excellent self-hosted CI runner — full performance, persistent caches, and no per-minute macOS billing.

GitHub Actions

On your Mac, from your repo’s Settings → Actions → Runners → New self-hosted runner, follow the macOS instructions:

mkdir actions-runner && cd actions-runner
curl -o actions-runner-osx-arm64.tar.gz -L <URL-from-GitHub>
tar xzf actions-runner-osx-arm64.tar.gz
./config.sh --url https://github.com/ORG/REPO --token <TOKEN>
./run.sh        # or install as a service:
./svc.sh install && ./svc.sh start

Target it in a workflow with runs-on: self-hosted (or a custom label).

GitLab CI

brew install gitlab-runner
gitlab-runner register \
  --url https://gitlab.com/ \
  --registration-token <TOKEN> \
  --executor shell \
  --description "mac-mini-m4"
brew services start gitlab-runner

Use a matching tags: entry in .gitlab-ci.yml.

Jenkins

Run a Jenkins agent over SSH or JNLP. Add the Mac as a node (Manage Jenkins → Nodes → New Node), set the remote root (e.g. /Users/your-username/jenkins), and connect via the SSH launcher using your SSH key.

Tip

Run the runner as a launchd service so it survives reboots and starts automatically. Most runners above offer an install/services command for this.

Keep it healthy

• Clean DerivedData and old simulators regularly to reclaim disk.
• Pin Xcode versions with xcodes so builds are reproducible.
• Watch free space with df -h; upgrade the SSD tier if needed.