RHEL Comes to GitHub Actions: Red Hat Enterprise Linux Runner Images Hit Public Preview

If your production fleet runs on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, there’s always been a quiet gap in your CI/CD story: you build, test, and ship for RHEL, but your GitHub-hosted runners were Ubuntu. As of June 25, 2026, that gap is closing. GitHub-hosted larger runners now support RHEL 9 and RHEL 10 images in public preview, delivered in partnership with Red Hat.

Table of Contents

What was announced

GitHub-hosted larger runners can now boot Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 and RHEL 10 images. The headline points:

Two versions out of the gate: RHEL 9 and RHEL 10.
Platform: Linux x64 larger runners only (for now).
Custom image foundation: You can use the RHEL images as a base to bake your own custom images with the tools, dependencies, and configuration your builds need.
How to get it: Create a new larger runner and pick your RHEL image under Linux x64 partner images.

It’s a public preview, so expect it to mature — but it’s available to try today.

Why this actually matters

For a lot of teams, “it works on the runner” and “it works in production” have never been the same sentence. When your servers are RHEL and your CI is Ubuntu, you inherit a list of subtle mismatches:

Different package managers and libraries. dnf/yum and the RHEL package set versus apt and Debian/Ubuntu builds. Glibc versions, OpenSSL versions, and system library differences can all change behavior.
SELinux and security posture. RHEL ships with SELinux and a different default hardening baseline. Testing on a distro that doesn’t match means you find SELinux denials in production, not in CI.
Compiled artifacts and RPMs. If you build RPMs or native binaries, building them on the same OS family you deploy to removes a whole class of “works here, breaks there” surprises.
Compliance and certification. Regulated environments (FedRAMP, FIPS, gov workloads) frequently mandate RHEL. Building and testing on RHEL keeps your supply chain consistent with what auditors expect.

Running CI on the same OS you run in production isn’t a nice-to-have for these teams — it’s the difference between catching a problem in a pull request and catching it during a 2 a.m. page.

The custom image angle

The detail that’s easy to skim past is the most useful one: these RHEL images are meant to be a foundation for custom images. Instead of reinstalling your toolchain on every job with a 5-minute dnf install preamble, you can bake a golden RHEL image that already has your compilers, database clients, internal CA certs, and agents pre-installed. Jobs start faster, builds are more reproducible, and your hardening lives in the image rather than in a fragile setup script.

If you’ve ever maintained a hardened RHEL base image for your servers, this should feel familiar — it’s the same pattern, now applied to your runners.

Who should care

Platform and infrastructure teams standardizing on RHEL across their estate.
Database and persistence teams running PostgreSQL, Redis, OpenSearch, or similar on RHEL who want CI to mirror production exactly.
Regulated/enterprise shops with RHEL or FIPS requirements where distro parity is a compliance concern, not just a convenience.
Anyone shipping RPMs or native binaries who’s tired of cross-distro build drift.

How to try it

Go to your organization (or repository) runner settings.
Create a new larger runner.
Under Linux x64 partner images, choose your desired RHEL 9 or RHEL 10 image.
Point a workflow at the new runner label and run a build.

From there, the natural next step is to turn that RHEL runner into a custom image with your standard toolchain pre-installed.

For the official details, see GitHub’s documentation on managing larger runners and using custom images.

The bottom line

RHEL runner images are a small announcement with an outsized impact for the right audience. If you deploy to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, you can finally build and test on it too — natively, on GitHub-hosted infrastructure, with custom images that match your production hardening. For teams who’ve spent years papering over the Ubuntu-CI-to-RHEL-prod gap, this is one less source of “but it passed in CI.”

Source: GitHub Changelog — Red Hat Enterprise Linux runner images are now in public preview