Troubleshooting

Jobs stuck in “queued” after making a repository public

Symptom: Workflows that previously ran fine on self-hosted runners stop being picked up after converting a repository from private to public. Jobs stay in queued state indefinitely. No errors appear in the controller logs.

Cause: The organization’s runner group has allows_public_repositories set to false by default. When the repository was private, runners worked normally. After making it public, the runner group silently refuses to route jobs to the runners.

Fix: Enable public repository access on the runner group.

Via the GitHub UI:

1. Go to Organization Settings > Actions > Runner groups
2. Select the runner group (e.g. Default)
3. Check Allow public repositories

Via the GitHub API:

gh api -X PATCH orgs/YOUR-ORG/actions/runner-groups/1 \
  --input - <<< '{"allows_public_repositories": true}'

Caution

This is a silent failure — there are no errors in the controller logs and no indication in the GitHub Actions UI beyond the job staying queued.