Installing a runner

Since GitLab CI is created in a way such that it distributes all the builds over more machines, we have to install a so-called runner. A runner is nothing more than a build instance. There can be multiple runners on one machine, but it's also possible to move these runners away to other servers. The ideal situation would be to have one server as the coordinator (hosting the CI web app and controlling the runners) and at least one other server to run one or more runners.

How to do it…

We perform the following steps to install the runner:

  1. Log in via SSH to your runner server.
  2. Start by updating the apt-get repository:
    $ sudo apt-get update –y
  3. Now, we install all the dependencies:
    $ sudo apt-get install -y wget curl gcc libxml2-dev ...

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