Scope

This document helps teach you how to connect your IBM Kubernetes cluster to a Hosted Gitlab instance so you can leverage your own infrastructure for continuous integration and continuous deployment.

Most of this document is influenced from the official documentation from Gitlab.

Prerequisites

A Kubernetes cluster on the IBM cloud
- An IP that the your Gitlab instance can reach
ibmcloud CLI installed and configured

Steps

Authenticate with the IBM cloud CLI so you can connect to your Kubernetes cluster.

ibmcloud login # with --sso if you need to use single sign on
ibmcloud cs region-set us-south # The region you have your cluster in
ibmcloud cs cluster-config YOURCLUSTERNAME # you will need to run the export KUBECONFIG command
kubectl get nodes # a sanity check to make sure you can authenticate with your Kubernetes cluster

Create a directory to do some work inside of it, and save some files if needed.
```
mkdir gitlab-runner
cd gitlab-runner
```

Add the helm repo from gitlab.

helm repo add gitlab https://charts.gitlab.io

Initialize helm on both your local machine and in your Kubernetes cluster.
```
helm init
```
Create a values.yaml for your configuration of gitlab-runner, the full values.yml is here.
```
wget https://gitlab.com/charts/gitlab-runner/raw/master/values.yaml
vi values.yaml
```
The only two settings you have to edit in the values.yaml are the following:
- gitlabUrl - the GitLab Server URL (with protocol) to register the runner against
- runnerRegistrationToken - The Registration Token for adding new Runners to the GitLab Server. This must be retrieved from your GitLab Instance. See the GitLab Runner Documentation for more information.
After the configuration is complete, run the following command with a NAMESPACE that won’t step on another project. Using something like gitlab-runners as the namespace will isolate the pods in your Kubernetes cluster.
```
helm install --namespace NAMESPACE --name gitlab-runner -f values.yaml gitlab/gitlab-runner
```
You should now be able to see your runner in the admin/runners URL on your Gitlab instance.

Uninstalling

To uninstall the GitLab Runner Chart, run the following:

helm delete --namespace NAMESPACE RELEASE-NAME