The runner architecture and supported platforms

Before going into further details about runner components, installation, and configuration, it’s worth clarifying a few pieces of terminology. So far in this chapter, the words GitLab Runner and runner may appear to have been used interchangeably. However, a bit of nuance is required. GitLab Runner refers to the application installed once on a computer. Once the GitLab Runner application is installed, it does not yet communicate with GitLab or run CI/CD jobs. In order to connect to GitLab and run CI/CD jobs, an administrator will need to execute a GitLab Runner command that registers individual runners with GitLab and specifies the execution environment those runners will use. Each registered runner will then be a dedicated process that checks into GitLab and runs CI/CD jobs.

This setup can appear confusing at first because a single GitLab Runner application will normally support registering multiple runner processes on the...