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René Jochum

Blog of René Jochum - A FOSS enthusiast who's programming since 2002.

gitlab-runner docker with debian systemd


An howto on systemd with a Debian stretch/buster docker container and Gitlab.

Find all code on Github stretch and buster.

Debian Stretch

This didn’t work at all with systemd from Debian stretch, but as i knew from my LXD experience systemd in stretch is buggy with containers, so i tried systemd from stretch-backports which worked well.

Now to have systemd finaly working in a stretch container you need to mount a tmpfs into /run and /run/lock else systemd tries to mount those - fails with permission denied and freezes.

Also you need to bind-mount cgroups into the stretch container (doing that as “volume”).

This is the full line to run a Debian 9 container with systemd from backports:

docker run -d -it --mount type=tmpfs,destination=/run --mount type=tmpfs,destination=/run/lock -v /sys/fs/cgroup:/sys/fs/cgroup:ro <image>

Debian Buster

It’s same as with stretch but no backports.

Gitlab-runner for both

Ok, so we found out that we need:

  • a tmpfs /run
  • a tmpfs /run/lock
  • cgroup bind-mount

gitlab-runner does volumes which means the bind-mount is easy to solve, but what about the tmpfs mounts?

After a while a found a feature they call Mounting a directory in RAM, which is nothing else than a mount of a tmpfs :)

This means we need to add the following to /etc/gitlab-runner/config.toml:

[runners.docker]
    volumes = ["/sys/fs/cgroup:/sys/fs/cgroup:ro", "/cache"]
[runners.docker.services_tmpfs]
    "/run" = "rw"
    "/run/lock" = "rw"

Easy, isn’t it?