Looks like PHP 8.3 is not installed by default like GitHub runners

[yguedidi]

When using GitHub runners and shivammathur/setup-php@v2 action, PHP installs very fast, just 6 seconds, see:

But with RunsOn Ubuntu full 24 image, it takes way more time, ~40 seconds, see:

The message from the action clearly says "Installed" and not "Updated".

I have many jobs using PHP, so my CI takes way longer with RunsOn than with GitHub runners.
I would have expected that AWS images are compatible with GitHub runners in a sense that same packages are installed by default.

Is it an issue or expected? how can I help?

Thanks for this great tool!

[yguedidi]

Managed to found this line in the code: https://github.com/runs-on/runner-images-for-aws/blob/main/patches/ubuntu/templates/ubuntu24-full-x64.pkr.hcl#L304
Any reason it is commented?

[crohr]

@yguedidi the goal is to have the most optimized (i.e. fast to boot) images, while not missing too much when proper language-specific actions exist. So from the start I chose to remove many not-critical things, and see if there are any complaints.

Looking at the action, it looks like it does a full apt add repo + apt install when a PHP version can't be found on the system, which obviously takes a while (most actions download some kind of precompiled tarball instead, which is much faster). This also means (as far as I can see) that it can't cache the downloaded PHP version for the next runs...

I'll enable PHP to the next image release and see how it goes.

[yguedidi]

I'll enable PHP to the next image release and see how it goes.

Thank you so much! is the next release date known already?

[crohr]

@yguedidi it should be live! You can subscribe to the releases of this repo (https://github.com/runs-on/runner-images-for-aws/releases/tag/20250206082753)