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As part of setting up our CI/CD infrastructure, we provisioned a self-hosted GitHub Actions runner inside a Docker container on an EC2 instance. Below is a detailed walkthrough of what we did:

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Step 1. Launching an EC2 Instance

• We logged into the AWS Management Console and navigated to EC2 → Launch Instance.

• Configuration details:

  • AMI: Ubuntu 22.04 LTS
  • Instance Type: t2.medium
  • Key Pair: We created and downloaded a .pem key file for secure SSH access. We named it tcs-runner-key.pem.
  • Security Group: We opened port 22 for SSH.

  

Step 2. Configuring docker runner Files

In the infrastruture repo, we configured the the runner files to match our variables

• Dockerfile

• docker-compose.yaml

• entrypoint.sh

• .env

• In the .env file, we updated the following

  • Change the Repo name to The-Cloud-Squad/tcs_infra which had already been created on github
  • Updated the GITHUB PATH (which is the PAT token)
  • Changed the runner name to docker-runner

• In the docker-compose.yaml we commented out the user: root, since we ere not using the roort user credentials to connect

  

• The other files were left as is.

Step 3. Connecting via MobaXterm

• We used MobaXterm terminal to SSH into the EC2 instance created in step 1.

  • SSH → Remote Host:

  • Specify username as ubuntu and use the .pem file as identity.

  • We also used the built-in SFTP browser type in MobaXterm to upload files directly to the server.

    

Step 4. Installing Required Packages on EC2

• Once connected, we updated the system and installed Docker tools (Docker and Docker Compose

sudo apt update && apt install docker.io docker-compose -y
sudo apt install tree

#added the Ubuntu user to the Docker group to allow non-root Docker access:
sudo usermod -aG docker ubuntu
exit # logout and re-login for group change to apply
sudo su - ubuntu

• We added the Ubuntu user to the Docker group to allow non-root Docker access:

sudo usermod -aG docker ubuntu
exit # logout and re-login for group change to apply
sudo su - ubuntu

• Confirmed installation with: