How do I go about cleaning up older GitHub Action runs on our self-hosted runner server?

[Rod-at-DOH]

🏷️ Discussion Type

Bug

💬 Feature/Topic Area

ARC (Actions Runner Controller)

Discussion Details

Over the weekend I learned that old GitHub Action executions remain on self-hosted runner servers. I naïvely thought that they were automatically cleaned up. So, that was a surprise to me to learn that idea is wrong. I guess it makes sense, so people can review the logs of recent self-hosted runner actions.

But now that I know this, how do I go about purging older GitHub Action runs from off our Windows 2022 Server?

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[PrinceJoshi312]

You can clean old GitHub Actions runs on a self-hosted runner by removing the _work directory where job data is stored.

On Windows Server navigate to your runner installation folder and clean old workspaces :
go to

cd C:\actions-runner
Remove-Item -Recurse -Force .\_work\*

This will delete cached job files from previous runs, also u can do auto cleanup

do this for it automatic cleanup, you can also:

• Enable --ephemeral runners (they self-delete after each job)
• Or schedule a Windows Task to periodically clean _work

Example scheduled cleanup (PowerShell):

Get-ChildItem "C:\actions-runner\_work" | 
Where-Object {$_.LastWriteTime -lt (Get-Date).AddDays(-7)} | 
Remove-Item -Recurse -Force

This will remove runs older than 7 days, try it and see if it works in your case.

[Rod-at-DOH]

Thank you, I'll give this a try.