Gitlab Python Runner

Gitlab is brilliant, the official gitlab runner is pretty robust and supports all the best new features of gitlab.

But one thing that poses as a bit of an obstacle for those of us with fairly exotic build environments is that the official gitlab runner is written in Go, and Go (or GCC-go) is not available on every platform.

So this project was born to fill this niche where you want to use gitlab on a system that simply can't run the official gitlab-runner and where the ssh executor wont work. You should be able to a "shell" executor on any system that can run git and supports recent python (2.7 or 3.6+)

The runner is in active use on other projects:

• CUnit - https://gitlab.com/cunity/cunit/pipelines
  • Windows Docker
  • Solaris 11 on AMD64
  • Linux Ubuntu 19.04 on Power9

Systems that are intended as targets are:

• Windows + Docker (until official windows docker runner is ready for use)
• Solaris 11 (patches to the official runner exist but are hard to apply)
• HP-UX on Itanium (IA64)
• AIX 6.1, 7.1 on POWER
• Linux on POWER
• x64/x86 Linux (but only for internal testing)

Supported Systems

There really is no sensible reason to use gilab-python-runner on x64 linux other than to test changes to the project.

Setup and Deployment

Register a Runner

At the very least you need to know the gitlab server address (eg https://gitlab.com) and the runner registration token (you get this from your runners page on your server, project or group)

pip install gitlab-python-runner

mkdir gitlab
cd gitlab

gitlab-runner.py --register https://gitlab.com --regtoken xZ139xcd343424cd --type shell --tag mytag

This should exit without an error (TODO print more useful feedback) and have created a config file.

cat gitlab-runner.yml
dir: /home/inb/gitlab
executor: shell
server: https://gitlab.com
shell: /bin/sh
token: !!python/unicode 'guXssHacXXL6931Xn3Xx'

This will have created a new runner on your gitlab server with the tag given above by --tag ARG It should also have set a meaningful description for you.

Starting the Runner

You can decide to start the runner as part of an init script, or within a screen session or maybe as the entrypoint in a docker container. You simply need to point it at the yaml file created by using --register

gitlab-runner.py --start /home/inb/gitlab/gitlab-runner.yml

Which should start to poll the server :

inb@carrot:~/gitlab$ gitlab-runner.py --start gitlab-runner.yml
2019-04-25 15:40:45,246 gitlab-emulator  Polling for jobs..
2019-04-25 15:40:55,742 gitlab-emulator  Polling for jobs..