Creating and Using GitLab Runners and Executors

As a reminder, there are different types of runners in GitLab: Shared Runners, Group Runners, and Specific Runners. We are going to learn how to create Group Runners and Specific Runners in this section.

To create a Group Runner, navigate to the group settings and select the Build -> Runners option from the left-hand menu. Click on New Group Runner and you will be presented with a form to fill in the details of the runner.

Specific Runners (runners dedicated to a single project) are created in the project settings. To create a Specific Runner, navigate to the project settings and select the CI/CD -> Runners option from the left-hand menu. The process of creating this type of runners is similar to creating a Group Runner.

We are going to proceed with the the Group Runner for the remainder of this section.

Runners are identified by one or more tags, which are used to match jobs to runners. You are free to use tags in the way you want, they have no functional impact on the runner itself. For example, you can create a runner with the tag python and assign it to specific jobs. You can also assign multiple tags to a runner, such as shared and python, to indicate that the runner is shared and can be used for Python jobs. If you want to use this runner for all jobs in the group, you can activate the option Run untagged jobs and if you want to use it for protected branches, you can activate the option Protected.

Let's proceed with creating a runner with the tags linux and python. Don't activate Run untagged jobs and Protected for now.