[arianvanp]

Getting Gitlab CI to work has been a major PITA for me. I would maybe give it a quarter circle in its current state. Not a heart.

The runner self-modifies the config file and uses it as state which makes it basically impossible to deploy it in an immutable way (Like on nixos). I found out that most config options (but not all of them) are also avaible as environment variables and cli flags so that's how I hacked around the issue but it means I can't support all features that the runner has because the environment variables do not expose all the available config options.

The fact that it's so hard to automate a piece of (in theory) stateless software is really annoying :(

https://gitlab.com/arianvp/nixos-gitlab-runner https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-runner/issues/1932 https://gitlab.com/arianvp/nixos-gitlab-runner/issues/2

[rossmohax]

Luckily they started to adapt Kubernetes themselves and some good improvements are underway from this doogfooding.

In particular UX of a runner registration was improved with config template feature https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-runner/merge_requests/1...

There is still a problem, that self modifying config option doesn't fit nicely with Nix though