Option to not do docker pull?

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Describe the enhancement If I have a local runner and a locally maintained docker image i.e. not stored on a repository, I would like to avoid the “docker pull” step, which then fails.

Code Snippet

name: Self Hosted Tests

on: [push]

jobs:
  integration_tests:
      runs-on: self-hosted
      container:
          image: python3.6:latest
      steps:
      - name: Checkout
        uses: actions/checkout@v2
      - name: What java version do we have
        run: java -version

Additional information The image python3.6:latest is in my self-hosted runner’s docker images. It doesn’t exist in DockerHub or any other repository, and I don’t want it to, because it should only ever be run on my self-hosted runner.

NOTE: if the feature request has been agreed upon then the assignee will create an ADR. See docs/adrs/README.md

[sdarwin]

It would be really helpful if these options were supported:

pull: if-not-exists # only pull the image if not found in the local cache
pull: always # always pull the newest version of the image
pull: never # never pull the image and always use the image in the local cache

This allows baking docker images into AMIs, and use if-not-exists so it only downloads when necessary.

[AllanOricil]

docker does not pull the image again if it exists already:

But you have to publish the image to a registry so that the pull ackowledges that the image has not changed. To avoid using a remote registry, you can start a local registry in the runner docker run registry, and publish the image to this registry. Then, in the workflow job, write this:

container:
    image: <IP_ADDRESS>:<PORT>/<IMAGE_NAME>:<IMAGE_TAG>