Github workflow minutes warning for private repos

Just discovered the hard way that github screws users who use workflows to build on macOs or windows os.

You get 2000 minutes per month free build time on private repo.

Linux = 1 x 1 minutes
windows = 2 x 1 minutes
macos = 10 x 1 minutes

161 minutes of testing mac os = 1610 minutes off the month!
138 minutes of testing windows = 276 minutes off the month!

If you are not testing workflows you probably wont hit the limit, unless using macOs.

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I’m amazed I haven’t hit this limit yet.

It only affects github actions using those OS for builds.

Normal repository use isn’t affected as it doesn’t count towards minutes.

I have never seen a single mention of these ratios until I was blocked.

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I use MacOS a lot for continuous integration. I’ll start curtailing that. Is there an easy way to track how many minutes I’ve used?

Yes, click your avatar in top right of browser and select settings>billing and under there it shows github actions use.

Toggle the > to see a breakdown of minutes for each OS.

Edit: hover over minutes and it shows ratios

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I quickly realized why these limits haven’t affected me yet … none of my GitHub repos are private!

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According to their docs

you are affected.

When I ran the report, it showed me using 0 minutes during the past 6 months.

Apparently “unlimited public repositories with a full feature set” means: not only can I have an unlimited number of public repos, but their Actions minutes are unlimited as well.

Yes.

So I will just push generic tests to a public repo for awhile…

So, source code in private repo and binaries for test in public.:thinking:

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Yes, thats the hook I guess. They must have to pay high fees to use m$ and macOs servers.

M$ don’t make sense because they own them now.

You would think they would want to promote their own platform and make it 1 hours = 0.5 hours for windows and try to get testing to move from linux to windows. But instead they ensure that we don’t write unit tests for windows.

Wondering if they put 10x on macOs after purchase. Wouldn’t doubt it but I wouldn’t put it past Apple to be the problem there either.

Discovered a bug in github runner was causing macOs builds to take about 3X as long to build.

Github gave me a fix today. Knocked 3 minutes off each build.

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