Deploy a GitLab runner on Clever Cloud

4 min readJan 23, 2018

Clever Cloud (https://www.clever-cloud.com/) is a PaaS platform where you can easily deploy your WebApps with a simple git push of your source code (see https://www.clever-cloud.com/doc/clever-cloud-overview/add-application/).

But you can deploy something else than code. And on this rainy Sunday, I decided to deploy a GitLab runner on Clever Cloud. A GitLab runner is the executable that will make the builds of your project, will run the tests with each commits … and finally who will “discuss” with GitLab CI to give the results of builds, tests, … to the GitLab platform (GitLab.com or your own instance).

There are a lot of possibilities. But today I will limit myself to a simple runner: a “shell” runner, that will download the dependencies of my node.js project and run the tests.

You need a nodejs project

Here is an example of a project that you can use:

https://gitlab.com/wey-yu/hello

To start the project tests just run the command npm test

To enable continuous integration (the CI part) in your GitLab project, just add a .gitlab-ci.yml file to the root of your project:

It is now that we are going to need a runner.

Project setup for the use of a runner

Go to the settings of your project and choose CI/CD, then scroll down the Runners settings section (by clicking on the Expand button) and you will thus obtain 2 important parameters:

The GitLab instance url
A token that will allow the runner to “send” informations to your GitLab instance

So keep this token, it will be useful for the definition of our runner.

⚠️ Then, very important, you need to define a “Personal Access Token” in the settings of your GitLab profile (and keep this second token somewhere).

Runner creation on Clever Cloud platform

To create my runner on Clever Cloud I will use a Dokerfile and a shell script file that I would deploy as an application on Clever Cloud.

So, create a my-runnerdirectory with the following 2 files:

The Dockerfile will basically be used to install the gitlab-runner and nodejs with npm, then run the go.shfile:

What does go.sh do?

The script retrieves the list of runners in progress with the GitLab API (hence the necessity of the access token) and retrieves the id of the runner by doing a search on the description of the runner
Then we delete this entry (always with the API), if the list was empty it will generate an error (but it is not blocking)
Note: I am doing this deletion because each time we restart our application, we will create a new runner record, so it is to avoid unnecessary accumulation
Then the runner registers with the GitLab instance with the command gitlab-runner register
Then it starts with the gitlab-runner run command
And finally I launch an http server because the platform Clever Cloud expects to launch a WebApp listening on 8080 (otherwise the platform will refuse to launch my application)

Let’s deploy the runner on Clever Cloud 🚀

In the my-runner directory do a git init then a git add . and finally a git commit -m “add my runner”
Then go to the Clever Cloud platform and create a Docker application with the following environment variables:

The platform will provide you with a git url to add to your project to be able to deploy it (eg: git remote add clever git+ssh://git@push-par-clevercloud-customers.services.clever-cloud.com/app_8fe8296c-bad4-4467-8aee-5bc32f4c83bf.git)
So you can deploy: git push -u clever master
Wait a little
Once your deployment is complete, you can return to your GitLab project

And in the settings you will see that your runner is well registered:

Start a pipeline

Now go to the CI/CD section of your repository, select the sub-section Pipelines:

Click on the “Run Pipeline” button. You will then be able to create a pipeline:

So click on the “Create Pipeline” button. This will trigger the creation of the pipeline and start it starting with the installation of the dependencies: