Why A Mac Mini As Self-Hosted Build Agent Makes Sense

Although it’s a pricy initial investment, you will benefit in the long run.

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I work in a company that develops and publishes mobile apps for iOS and Android. We mostly use Flutter as a framework to quickly build and ship apps for both platforms. A major drawback always were the integration tests that took forever on GitHub and even failed sometimes due to timeouts.

So we bought a Mac Mini, set it up as a self-hosted runner, tested it, and put it in the server room. While the execution times didn’t change that much, the reliability went up a lot. Timeouts don’t happen anymore and this was a major issue that developers were facing.

GitHub Actions Costs

Yes, it costs some money but GitHub Actions is also not for free.

With an enterprise account you get 50,000 build minutes for free every month. This is roughly 833 hours or 35 days. Sounds good? Maybe but don’t forget that these minutes are shared across the entire organization. If you have a nightly build of 10 or more apps in addition to the regular checks before and after your reviews, the minutes shrink quite fast.

And besides that, there are minute multipliers. Running on Linux is 10 times cheaper than running on…