Github on Maceage's Blog

Automated Unreal Engine Build Server on AWS Part 3: Build

Sun, 06 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This is the final part of the series, continuing from creating a GitHub self-hosted runner base AMI and creating an AMI with a specific version of Unreal Engine. Everything now comes together: a published GitHub Release triggers a Spot Instance, which registers itself as a self-hosted runner, builds the project, uploads artefacts to S3, and tears itself down.

As always, the full code lives at: sawnoff-studios/unreal-build-server-image

This post covers how to use an EC2 Spot Instance GitHub Actions self-hosted runner:

Automated Unreal Engine Build Server on AWS Part 2: Unreal AMI

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This post continues from Part 1, where I created a base AMI with build tools installed. Now I’ll cover two critical pieces:

A Lambda function that automatically retrieves GitHub runner tokens (solving the token expiry problem)
An AMI with a specific Unreal Engine version installed, ready for GitHub Actions builds

The complete code repository is available at: sawnoff-studios/unreal-build-server-image

This post covers the Lambda used for retrieving self-hosted runner tokens from GitHub, as well as using the base AMI to install a specific version of Unreal Engine for building projects

Automated Unreal Engine Build Server on AWS Part 1: Base AMI

Wed, 02 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

After completing my CG Spectrum Unreal Engine course, I wanted to automate the build and release process for my game prototype. While building locally, zipping artefacts, and uploading somewhere would have worked, I aimed for something more robust: trigger a GitHub release that automatically provisions a Spot Instance, builds the project, and uploads results to S3.

The Problem

My initial approach involved manually configuring an EC2 instance, installing dependencies by hand, and registering a GitHub self-hosted runner. I created an AMI from that instance and configured GitHub Actions to use it.

Backing up GitHub repositories

Thu, 20 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

After a litany of outages on GitHub, horror stories of people losing their Blogger blogs, broadcasters losing years of data in cloud storage and Google account suspensions, I suddenly realised I had no offline backups of my GitHub repositories.

I’d heard of this kind of thing happening to blogs, but I didn’t expect it to happen to GitHub so soon. And with AI agents known for deleting random shit, I decided it was time to find a solution that could reliably back up my repositories.