GitLab Runner is an open-source tool that runs CICD jobs in the pipeline. GitLab provides 400 min per month of runner time for free. It’s enough for individuals but not for the teams. GitLab allows you to set up your custom runner on any virtual machine. (separate from the server running GitLab if you have a self-hosted GitLab). Having our custom runner gives us benefits like better security and faster deployments.

In this blog, I will install a GitLab runner in an EC2. Please refer to this article if you don’t know how to spin up an EC2 instance; you can go for t3.micro if you want to benefit from the AWS free tier.