Setting up Gitlab CI (I): docker+gitlab-runner

A brief introduction about how to setup Gitlab CI (part I).

If you are new to docker, this post might help: Click this

Install and setup gitlab runner

# Install gitlab runner docker image
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
# Config and register runner
docker exec -it ${container_id_of_gitlab-runner} gitlab-runner register

If you have installed gitlab-runner binary, you also can do register by one single command:

sudo gitlab-runner register \
  --non-interactive \
  --url "https://gitlab.com/" \
  --registration-token "PROJECT_REGISTRATION_TOKEN" \
  --executor "docker" \
  --docker-image alpine:latest \
  --description "description_of_runner" \
  --tag-list "docker,aws" \
  --run-untagged="true" \
  --locked="false" \
  --access-level="not_protected"

Prepare your docker image as CI environment

Docker images can be built from a local Dockerfile:

docker build -t ${image_name}:${version_number} .

There is a “.” at the end, don’t forget it.

Create local docker hub

Normally you can deploy your image to dockerhub.com. But if you don’t want to open your images to public, you also can create a local docker hub instead:

docker run -d -p 5000:5000 --restart=always --name registry registry:2
docker tag ${image_name}:${image_tag} localhost:5000/${image_name}
docker push localhost:5000/${image_name}

After that gitlab-runner can “download” your images from localhost:5000/${image_name}.

You also can do a quick check if your image repo exist or not by accessing catalog:

curl http://localhost:5000/v2/_catalog

To be continued…