Cannot Checkout Code When Running jobs Inside Container about docker-github-actions-runner

[julian1059]

@ukewea great discovery!! I too was having the same issue checking out code when using containers for my jobs. However, my setup is within Kubernetes. My pod has two containers, the runner and the docker in docker container used to run all docker commands/actions. The underlying file structure is shared through a set of volumes. Sure enough, my docker in docker container did not have the directory /actions-runner/ as you discovered above. I was able to use an initContainer to copy the data from the /actions-runner/ dir on the image to my shared volume. Once both the containers spun up, they each had access to the entirety of the /actions-runner/ directory. Confirmed code checkout then worked without a hitch 👍

initContainers:
  - name: configure-actions-runner-dir
    image: myoung34/github-runner:latest
    command: ["/bin/bash", "-c"]
    args:
      - |
        cp -R /actions-runner/* /actions-runner-volume/
    securityContext:
      runAsUser: 0
    volumeMounts:
      - mountPath: /actions-runner-volume/
        name: actions-runner

[myoung34]

This is a question for the upstream actions team, this repo is only concerned with installing the runner itself

[ukewea]

Thanks for the hint, after some digging, it is the issue of job container creation.

In the "Initialize containers > Starting job container" step, by looking at the command that used to start a new container, we can notice that it mapped /actions-runner/externals on my host machine to /__e in the containers that runs the job, but /actions-runner/externals only exists in the container that the runner was in, not on the host machine.

Raw text:

/usr/bin/docker create --name 7954e543b87540929d1873e3be523ef2_******dotnet_sdk_nodejs6020x_c0b4e8 --label c3f261 --workdir /__w/dotnet-cicd-eval/dotnet-cicd-eval --network github_network_69a556d20d5b4b48a1955f3b83e167b5  -e "HOME=/github/home" -e GITHUB_ACTIONS=true -e CI=true -v "/var/run/docker.sock":"/var/run/docker.sock" -v "/tmp/runner/work_2":"/__w" -v "/actions-runner/externals":"/__e":ro -v "/tmp/runner/work_2/_temp":"/__w/_temp" -v "/tmp/runner/work_2/_actions":"/__w/_actions" -v "/opt/hostedtoolcache":"/__t" -v "/tmp/runner/work_2/_temp/_github_home":"/github/home" -v "/tmp/runner/work_2/_temp/_github_workflow":"/github/workflow" --entrypoint "tail" ******/dotnet_sdk_nodejs:6.0-20.x "-f" "/dev/null"

I have a possible workaround: looks like it is possible to override the path of volumes to be mapped into job containers by creating a json file. Maybe I can give it a try and report in the next few days.