Using Different Runners

You can specify different operating systems for different jobs in your workflow. GitHub Actions provides hosted runners for Ubuntu, Windows, and macOS.

Example Workflow

In this example, the build job runs on ubuntu-latest, while the check-war-file-size job runs on windows-latest.

name: different-runners

on: workflow_dispatch

env:
  MVN_TARGET_FOLDER: "target"
  MVN_WAR_FILE_NAME: "hello-world*.war"

jobs:
  build-info:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: Printing build information
        run: |
          echo "Workflow name : $GITHUB_WORKFLOW"
          echo "Github repository name : $GITHUB_REPOSITORY"
          echo "Trigger event name : $GITHUB_EVENT_NAME"
          echo "Branch Name : $GITHUB_REF_NAME"
          echo "Runner name : $RUNNER_NAME"
          echo "Workflow triggered by : $GITHUB_ACTOR"
          echo "Workflow run number: $GITHUB_RUN_NUMBER"
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: Checkout
        uses: actions/checkout@v3
      - name: Setup Maven
        uses: stCarolas/setup-maven@v4.5
        with:
          maven-version: 3.6.0
      - name: Maven Build
        run: |
          mvn clean package
          pwd && ls -l
          ls -l ${{ env.MVN_TARGET_FOLDER }}
  check-war-file-size:
    runs-on: windows-latest
    steps:
      - name: Checking war file size
        run: |
          pwd
          ls -l ${{ env.MVN_TARGET_FOLDER }}
          du -sh ${{ env.MVN_TARGET_FOLDER }}/${{ env.MVN_WAR_FILE_NAME }}

Detailed Explanation

runs-on: windows-latest

This tells GitHub to provision a Windows Server VM for this job. Note that shell commands might differ between OSes (e.g., ls vs dir), although Git Bash is often available on Windows runners which supports many Linux commands.

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