I want to use a self-hosted runner for a local GitHub Enterprise Server Instance on a Debian machine.
I already installed the runner and the connection to my local GitHub is established. All machines are running behind a corporate HTTP proxy. Now if I want to run a workflow which requires an outbound connection, I’ll get a timeout because of the not configured proxy. After some research I configured the proxy in the .env file located in the action runner directory with the http_proxy and https_proxy variable.

The proxy requires Authentication via username and password and the proxy runs on port 8080 for example. So my proxy connection string would look like the following:
http://myuser:[email protected]:8080. This proxy connection string works perfectly on all linux based machines and other programs. But if I want to use GitHub Actions runner behind this proxy, any ran action failed with the exit message: URI malformed.

I already tried many variations of the proxy connection string:

• http://myuser:[email protected]:8080 > URI malformed
• http://myproxy.local:8080 > will fail due to no authentication
• http://[email protected]:8080 > won’t find password
• http://myuser:[email protected] > fails cause the action runner will try default port 1080 but mine is 8080

I also tried using the IP address of the proxy instead of the domain name: same errors as listed above.

Does anybody know how to fix the error “URI malformed” and how to configure the proxy for self-hosted runners? Or can tell me why the URI is malformed?

The password could contain special characters e.g. !, ?, $, %, &.