Automatically start cloud instances in the Hetzner Cloud as self-hosted runners for GitHub repositories. These are started and stopped automatically before and after the GitHub CI run.

1. Bootstrap your CI job to create a new hetzner instance:

jobs:
  prepare_env:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    name: Create new Hetzner Cloud instance for build
    steps:
      - uses: stonemaster/hetzner-github-runner@HEAD
        with:
          github-api-key: ${{ secrets.GH_API_KEY }}
          hetzner-api-key: ${{ secrets.HETZNER_API_KEY }}
          hetzner-instance-type: cx11

2. After this step another workflow can run on this self-hosted machine. Note that this job depends on prepare_env:

jobs:
  [...]
  actual_build:
    runs-on: self-hosted
    needs: prepare_env
    steps:
      - run: env
        shell: bash

Never put the tokens into clear-text but use the Repository secrets feature of the GitHub CI

• The GitHub API Key provided should just have read/write permission to the Repository Administration. This is needed to obtain a new registration token for your repository that is needed by the GitHub runner.
• A Hetzner API key needs to be generated for your project according to the offical documentation.