Ubuntu 26.04 runner images are available

The official runner images for Gitea Actions now support Ubuntu 26.04. The default images are now built directly from buildpack-deps instead of the unmaintained catthehacker/ubuntu images.

Ubuntu 26.04

Three new tags are available on Docker Hub and docker.gitea.com (#35):

Tag	Description
ubuntu-26.04	Default image, based on buildpack-deps:26.04
ubuntu-26.04-slim	Small Debian image with Node.js, the same as all other slim tags
ubuntu-26.04-full	Large image with the tools of GitHub Actions runners, amd64 only

ubuntu-latest and ubuntu-latest-full stay on 24.04 for now. The runner’s default labels do not include 26.04 yet, so add it to the labels in your runner’s config.yaml:

runner:
  labels:
    - "ubuntu-latest:docker://docker.gitea.com/runner-images:ubuntu-latest"
    - "ubuntu-26.04:docker://docker.gitea.com/runner-images:ubuntu-26.04"
    - "ubuntu-24.04:docker://docker.gitea.com/runner-images:ubuntu-24.04"
    - "ubuntu-22.04:docker://docker.gitea.com/runner-images:ubuntu-22.04"

Restart the runner, then use runs-on: ubuntu-26.04 in your workflows.

New default images

The default images for 22.04, 24.04 and 26.04 ship:

• Node.js 24 with Yarn, in the tool cache so actions/setup-node does not download it again
• Python 3 with pip and pipx
• Docker with Buildx and Compose
• git, git-lfs, jq, yq and other common CLI tools
• tea, the Gitea CLI

Large toolchains such as Java, Go, Rust, .NET and browsers are not included. Install them with the matching setup-* action, or use the -full images.

tea reads the instance and token from the environment, so a workflow can use it without logging in:

- run: tea issues list --repo "${GITHUB_REPOSITORY}"
  env:
    GITEA_INSTANCE_URL: ${{ gitea.server_url }}
    GITEA_TOKEN: ${{ gitea.token }}

What changed for existing users

The tags stay the same, but their contents changed:

• Node.js 20 is gone. The default and slim images ship Node.js 24 only. Use actions/setup-node if you need another version.
• Slim images moved from Debian 12 to Debian 13.
• Docker now comes from Docker’s own apt repository. The Microsoft apt repository is no longer configured, so apt-get update no longer hangs when it is unreachable.
• Full images are now based on ChristopherHX/runner-image-blobs instead of catthehacker/ubuntu:full-*. ubuntu-22.04-full is no longer updated upstream.

Unless force_pull is enabled, the runner keeps using images it has already pulled, so pull the new images on your runner hosts.

If you run into problems, please open an issue in the runner-images repository.