CI Runners

kindling provisions self-hosted GitHub Actions runners directly in your Kind cluster so CI jobs execute locally — no cloud minutes, no queuing.

Dashboard

You can also register runners from the dashboard: Setup → Runners, or press ⌘K and type "runner". See Dashboard for details.

Register a runner

kindling runners -u <github-user> -r <repo> -t <pat>

Flag	Description
-u, --username	GitHub username or org
-r, --repo	Repository name
-t, --token	Personal Access Token with repo scope
--provider	CI provider — github (default) or gitlab

All flags are optional on the command line; the CLI prompts for any missing values interactively.

What happens

1. A Kubernetes secret github-runner-token is created with your PAT.
2. A GithubActionRunnerPool CR is applied — the operator starts a runner pod that registers with your repository.
3. Pushes to the repo (or kindling push) trigger builds that run on this local runner.

Check runner status

kindling status

The Runners section shows registered pools and their ready state. You can also see runner pods on the dashboard Runners page (kindling dashboard → Setup → Runners).

Remove runners

kindling reset

This deletes the runner pool CR and the token secret while keeping the Kind cluster intact. To tear down everything including the cluster, use kindling destroy.

How builds work

Source is tarballed and sent to a Kaniko sidecar inside the runner pod. The built image is pushed to the in-cluster registry at localhost:5001 and the deployment is patched with the new image tag.

No Docker daemon is required — everything runs inside the cluster.

GitLab CI

Pass --provider gitlab to register a GitLab runner instead. The flow is identical but uses a GitLab runner token.

---

Examples

Simple — single repo

kindling runners -u jeff-vincent -r myorg/myapp -t ghp_abc123

One runner registers with myorg/myapp. Push to the repo and CI runs locally.

Multi-service — shared runner across repos

kindling runners -u jeff-vincent -r myorg/frontend -t ghp_abc123
kindling runners -u jeff-vincent -r myorg/api -t ghp_abc123

Each repo gets its own runner pool. Both build inside the same Kind cluster.

GitLab project

kindling runners -u jeff-vincent -r mygroup/myproject -t glrt-abc123 --provider gitlab

Same flow, different platform. The runner registers with GitLab instead of GitHub.