Little-CI: self-hosted runners on Apple Silicon
· 1 min read
I shipped Little-CI, a way to run a small, persistent fleet of GitHub Actions self-hosted runners on an Apple Silicon Mac. It creates an isolated Ubuntu machine with OrbStack, registers the runner services, and gives me commands to check their health, install them, and remove them. A dedicated Ubuntu server is supported too.
The default is deliberately small: one runner, two CPUs, 4 GB of memory, and a 48 GB disk. One runner takes one job at a time. I can add capacity after seeing what the jobs actually need.
The Mac setup keeps the runner inside the Linux guest, without Mac filesystem mounts or SSH-agent forwarding. That reduces exposure, but it does not make arbitrary workflow code safe. Little-CI is for trusted workflows in private repositories, not pull requests from public forks.
The README has the setup steps, resource profiles, and security model. Little-CI builds on Bob Senoff's self-hosted-ci-runner; the original Git history and MIT license are preserved.