summerwind/actions-runner:latest grabs ubuntu 20.04, not ubuntu 22.04

[sidneyprins]

Checks

• [x] I've already read https://github.com/actions/actions-runner-controller/blob/master/TROUBLESHOOTING.md and I'm sure my issue is not covered in the troubleshooting guide.
• [x] I'm not using a custom entrypoint in my runner image

Checks

• [x] This isn't a question or user support case (For Q&A and community support, go to Discussions. It might also be a good idea to contract with any of contributors and maintainers if your business is so critical and therefore you need priority support
• [x] I've read releasenotes before submitting this issue and I'm sure it's not due to any recently-introduced backward-incompatible changes
• [x] My actions-runner-controller version (v0.x.y) does support the feature
• [x] I've already upgraded ARC (including the CRDs, see charts/actions-runner-controller/docs/UPGRADING.md for details) to the latest and it didn't fix the issue
• [x] I've migrated to the workflow job webhook event (if you using webhook driven scaling)

To Reproduce

1. Go to https://hub.docker.com/r/summerwind/actions-runner/tags
2. Compare summerwind/actions-runner:latest with the latest ubuntu 20.04
3. They are the same, which should not be the case

Describe the bug

Hello,

The docker image summerwind/actions-runner with the tag :latest grabs ubuntu 20.04, instead of the newer version ubuntu 22.04.

Ubuntu 20.04 is phased out at Github as runner, so this means that github actions start dropping support 20.04. Would be nice if latest actually supports the latest ubuntu versions. Specifically mentioning this, because we will also get Ubuntu 24.04 at some point, so it should favor that one instead once that gets supported over 22.04.

Workaround

If you're facing the same issue, simply pin to ubuntu-22.04

Like this summerwind/actions-runner:ubuntu-22.04

Describe the expected behavior

Latest should grab ubuntu-22.04

Additional Context

[github-actions[bot]]

Hello! Thank you for filing an issue.

The maintainers will triage your issue shortly.

In the meantime, please take a look at the troubleshooting guide for bug reports.

If this is a feature request, please review our contribution guidelines.

[nikola-jokic]

Hey @sidneyprins,

Please properly populate the issue template and the title.

[sidneyprins]

Hey @nikola-jokic

Thanks, I have updated the title and cleaned up the issue of everything that is not related to this issue.

[Amnesthesia]

I'm also confused by this — started getting an error with actions/setup-ruby: Error: The current runner (ubuntu-20.04-x64) was detected as self-hosted because the platform does not match a GitHub-hosted runner image (or that image is deprecated and no longer supported)

Pulled the latest summerwind/actions-runner-dind and rebuilt our custom image, only to find the :latest tag still points to the 20.04 image, not 22.04

[SB-MFJ]

#3598 is related as the controller gates the version as well

[wyardley]

I was happy to get the pointer to the 22:04 tag, but agree that latest not being latest is confusing 🙃

[acrogenesis]

yeah kinda weird latest is not latest but you can use 22.04 like this: summerwind/actions-runner:ubuntu-22.04

[Larswa]

Why have a latest at all, and not just inherit the ubuntu versioning for the tags? Transparency and moving away from using latest always feels pretty good, I think.

[younsl]

Setting aside all the fundamental issues for a moment, using the latest tag in production is a common mistake that should be avoided. The problem is simple: latest keeps changing. What works today might break tomorrow when someone updates the image. You can't debug problems because you don't know which version is actually running, and you can't roll back because you don't know what was working before.

In Kubernetes, it gets worse - different nodes might pull different versions of latest at different times, so you end up running multiple versions at once. Instead, always use specific version tags (like v1.2.3 or commit hashes). This way, you know exactly what you're deploying and can reproduce it anytime.

[acrogenesis]

@younsl It depends on your use case. I use to build another image so everytime I make changes I want to pull the latest image to make sure I'm not using deprecated software.