GitLab is a truly wonderful devops platform. It has a complete CI/CD toolchain, it’s opensource (GitLab Community Edition) and it can also be self-hosted. One of its greatest feature are the GitLab Runner that are used in the CI/CD pipelines.
The GitLab Runner is also an opensource project written in Go and handles CI jobs of a pipeline. GitLab Runner implements Executors to run the continuous integration builds for different scenarios and the most used of them is the docker executor, although nowadays most of sysadmins are migrating to kubernetes executors.
I have a few personal projects in GitLab under https://gitlab.com/ebal but I would like to run GitLab Runner local on my system for testing purposes. GitLab Runner has to register to a GitLab instance, but I do not want to install the entire GitLab project. I want to use the docker executor and run my CI tests local.
Here are my notes on how to run GitLab Runner with the docker executor. No root access needed as long as your user is in the docker group. To give a sense of what this blog post is, the below image will act as reference.
GitLab Runner
The docker executor comes in two flavors:
- alpine
- ubuntu
In this blog post, I will use the ubuntu flavor.
Get the latest ubuntu docker image
docker pull gitlab/gitlab-runner:ubuntuVerify
$ docker run --rm -ti gitlab/gitlab-runner:ubuntu --version
Version: 12.10.1
Git revision: ce065b93
Git branch: 12-10-stable
GO version: go1.13.8
Built: 2020-04-22T21:29:52+0000
OS/Arch: linux/amd64
exec help
We are going to use the exec command to spin up the docker executor. With exec we will not need to register with a token.
$ docker run --rm -ti gitlab/gitlab-runner:ubuntu exec --help
Runtime platform arch=amd64 os=linux pid=6 revision=ce065b93 version=12.10.1
NAME:
gitlab-runner exec - execute a build locally
USAGE:
gitlab-runner exec command [command options] [arguments...]
COMMANDS:
shell use shell executor
ssh use ssh executor
virtualbox use virtualbox executor
custom use custom executor
docker use docker executor
Runner
5 minutes ago
# Run your CI test with GitLab-Runner on your system
GitLab parallels use parallels executor
OPTIONS:
--help, -h show help
Git Repo - tmux
Now we need to download the git repo, we would like to test. Inside the repo, it must have the .gitlab-ci.yml file. The gitlab-ci file describes the CI pipeline, with all the stages and jobs. In this blog post, I will use a simple repo that builds the latest version of tmux for centos6 & centos7.
git clone git@gitlab.com:rpmbased/tmux.git
cd tmux
Docker In Docker
The docker executor will spawn the GitLab Runner. GitLab Runner needs to communicate with our local docker service to spawn the CentOS docker image and to run the CI job.
So we need to pass the docker socket from our local docker service to GitLab Runner docker container.
To test dind (docker-in-docker) we can try one of the below commands:
docker run --rm -ti
-v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock
docker:latest sh
or
docker run --rm -ti
-v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock
ubuntu:20.04 bash
Limitations
There are some limitations of gitlab-runner exec.
We can not run stages and we can not download artifacts.
- stages no
- artifacts no
Jobs
So we have to adapt. As we can not run stages, we will tell gitlab-runner exec to run one specific job.
In the tmux repo, the build-centos-6 is the build job for centos6 and the build-centos-7 for centos7.
Artifacts
GitLab Runner will use the /builds as the build directory. We need to mount this directory as read-write to a local directory to get the artifact.
mkdir -pv artifacts/The docker executor has many docker options, there are options to setup a different cache directory. To see all the docker options type:
$ docker run --rm -ti gitlab/gitlab-runner:ubuntu exec docker --help | grep dockerBash Script
We can put everything from above to a bash script. The bash script will mount our current git project directory to the gitlab-runner, then with the help of dind it will spin up the centos docker container, passing our code and gitlab-ci file, run the CI job and then save the artifacts under /builds.
#!/bin/bash
# This will be the directory to save our artifacts
mkdir -p artifacts
JOB="build-centos-6"
# JOB="build-centos-7"
DOCKER_SOCKET="/var/run/docker.sock"
docker run --rm \
-v "$DOCKER_SOCKET":"$DOCKER_SOCKET" \
-v "$PWD":"$PWD" \
--workdir "$PWD" \
gitlab/gitlab-runner:ubuntu \
exec docker \
--docker-volumes="$PWD/artifacts":/builds:rw \
$JOB
That’s it.
You can try with your own gitlab repos, but dont forget to edit the gitlab-ci file accordingly, if needed.
Full example output
Last, but not least, here is the entire walkthrough
ebal@myhomepc:tmux(master)$ git remote -v
oring git@gitlab.com:rpmbased/tmux.git (fetch)
oring git@gitlab.com:rpmbased/tmux.git (push)
$ ./gitlab.run.sh
Runtime platform arch=amd64 os=linux pid=6 revision=ce065b93 version=12.10.1
Running with gitlab-runner 12.10.1 (ce065b93)
Preparing the "docker" executor
Using Docker executor with image centos:6 ...
Pulling docker image centos:6 ...
Using docker image sha256:d0957ffdf8a2ea8c8925903862b65a1b6850dbb019f88d45e927d3d5a3fa0c31 for centos:6 ...
Preparing environment
Running on runner--project-0-concurrent-0 via 42b751e35d01...
Getting source from Git repository
Fetching changes...
Initialized empty Git repository in /builds/0/project-0/.git/
Created fresh repository.
From /home/ebal/gitlab-runner/tmux
* [new branch] master -> origin/master
Checking out 6bb70469 as master...
Skipping Git submodules setup
Restoring cache
Downloading artifacts
Running before_script and script
$ export -p NAME=tmux
$ export -p VERSION=$(awk '/^Version/ {print $NF}' tmux.spec)
$ mkdir -p rpmbuild/{BUILD,RPMS,SOURCES,SPECS,SRPMS}
$ yum -y update &> /dev/null
$ yum -y install rpm-build curl gcc make automake autoconf pkg-config &> /dev/null
$ yum -y install libevent2-devel ncurses-devel &> /dev/null
$ cp $NAME.spec rpmbuild/SPECS/$NAME.spec
$ curl -sLo rpmbuild/SOURCES/$NAME-$VERSION.tar.gz https://github.com/tmux/$NAME/releases/download/$VERSION/$NAME-$VERSION.tar.gz
$ curl -sLo rpmbuild/SOURCES/bash-it.completion.bash https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Bash-it/bash-it/master/completion/available/bash-it.completion.bash
$ rpmbuild --define "_topdir ${PWD}/rpmbuild/" --clean -ba rpmbuild/SPECS/$NAME.spec &> /dev/null
$ cp rpmbuild/RPMS/x86_64/$NAME*.x86_64.rpm $CI_PROJECT_DIR/
Running after_script
Saving cache
Uploading artifacts for successful job
Job succeeded
artifacts
and here is the tmux-3.1-1.el6.x86_64.rpm
$ ls -l artifacts/0/project-0
total 368
-rw-rw-rw- 1 root root 374 Apr 27 09:13 README.md
drwxr-xr-x 1 root root 70 Apr 27 09:17 rpmbuild
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 365836 Apr 27 09:17 tmux-3.1-1.el6.x86_64.rpm
-rw-rw-rw- 1 root root 1115 Apr 27 09:13 tmux.spec
docker processes
if we run docker ps -a from another terminal, we see something like this:
$ docker ps -a
CONTAINER ID IMAGE COMMAND CREATED STATUS PORTS NAMES
b5333a7281ac d0957ffdf8a2 "sh -c 'if [ -x /usr…" 3 minutes ago Up 3 minutes runner--project-0-concurrent-0-e6ee009d5aa2c136-build-4
70491d10348f b6b00e0f09b9 "gitlab-runner-build" 3 minutes ago Exited (0) 3 minutes ago runner--project-0-concurrent-0-e6ee009d5aa2c136-predefined-3
7be453e5cd22 b6b00e0f09b9 "gitlab-runner-build" 4 minutes ago Exited (0) 4 minutes ago runner--project-0-concurrent-0-e6ee009d5aa2c136-predefined-2
1046287fba5d b6b00e0f09b9 "gitlab-runner-build" 4 minutes ago Exited (0) 4 minutes ago runner--project-0-concurrent-0-e6ee009d5aa2c136-predefined-1
f1ebc99ce773 b6b00e0f09b9 "gitlab-runner-build" 4 minutes ago Exited (0) 4 minutes ago runner--project-0-concurrent-0-e6ee009d5aa2c136-predefined-0
42b751e35d01 gitlab/gitlab-runner:ubuntu "/usr/bin/dumb-init …" 4 minutes ago Up 4 minutes vigorous_goldstine