Introduction

GitLab Runner is an application that works with GitLab CI/CD to run jobs in a pipeline.

Prerequisites

Your GitLab repository supports CI/CD
- You can enable the feature ON via following steps Settings → General → Visibility, project features, permissions → CI/CD
Server that supports docker (supported platforms)

Instructions

This section describes how to install and configure GitLab runner using docker on some server.

Deploy virtual server in Portal
Skip this step if you already have a server.
If you need new server, you can deploy one via TDS portal - Orchestration - Servers#Howtodeploynewserver

Install Docker engine on server – choose one of the following options

Option A - using "convenience script" from official instructions – recommended only for development and testing purposes
curl -fsSL https://get.docker.com -o get-docker.sh sudo sh get-docker.sh sudo systemctl start docker

Option B - specific approach for each relevant OS - basically setting up repository and installing Docker Engine - all supported OS instructions can be found at https://docs.docker.com/engine/install

CentOS - official instructions

sudo yum install -y yum-utils
sudo yum-config-manager --add-repo https://download.docker.com/linux/centos/docker-ce.repo
sudo yum install docker-ce docker-ce-cli containerd.io docker-buildx-plugin docker-compose-plugin -y

Fedora - official instructions

sudo dnf -y install dnf-plugins-core
sudo dnf config-manager --add-repo https://download.docker.com/linux/fedora/docker-ce.repo
sudo dnf install docker-ce docker-ce-cli containerd.io docker-buildx-plugin docker-compose-plugin -y

Ubuntu - official instructions

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install ca-certificates curl gnupg lsb-release -y
sudo mkdir -m 0755 -p /etc/apt/keyrings
curl -fsSL https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu/gpg | sudo gpg --dearmor -o /etc/apt/keyrings/docker.gpg
echo "deb [arch=$(dpkg --print-architecture) signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/docker.gpg] https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu $(lsb_release -cs) stable" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/docker.list > /dev/null

Start docker container with latest version of gitlab runner (official instructions)

docker run -d --name gitlab-runner --restart always -v /srv/gitlab-runner/config:/etc/gitlab-runner -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock gitlab/gitlab-runner:latest

Configure GitLab runner to connect to your repository
1. In your GitLab repository, go to Settings → CI/CD → Runners
2. You will need URL and "registration token" from "Set up a specific runner for a project" section
3. Execute following command on the server with running docker container
  docker exec -it gitlab-runner gitlab-runner register --docker-privileged
4. You will be prompted to fill-in following parameters:
  1. URL from step 4.b.
  2. Token from step 4.b.
  3. Description
  4. Tags for the runner (can leave this blank for the moment).
  5. Specify docker executor
  6. Specify a default Docker image (e.g. alpine:latest)