Polishing nspawn-runner

pdo debian eng sw systemd

This post is part of a series about trying to setup a gitlab runner based on systemd-nspawn. I published the polished result as nspawn-runner on GitHub.

gitlab-runner supports adding extra arguments to the custom scripts, and I can take advantage of that to pack all the various scripts that I prototyped so far into an all-in-one nspawn-runner command:

usage: nspawn-runner [-h] [-v] [--debug]
                     {chroot-create,chroot-login,prepare,run,cleanup,gitlab-config,toml}
                     ...

Manage systemd-nspawn machines for CI runs.

positional arguments:
  {chroot-create,chroot-login,prepare,run,cleanup,gitlab-config,toml}
                        sub-command help
    chroot-create       create a chroot that serves as a base for ephemeral
                        machines
    chroot-login        enter the chroot to perform maintenance
    prepare             start an ephemeral system for a CI run
    run                 run a command inside a CI machine
    cleanup             cleanup a CI machine after it's run
    gitlab-config       configuration step for gitlab-runner
    toml                output the toml configuration for the custom runner

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -v, --verbose         verbose output
  --debug               verbose output

chroot maintenance

chroot-create and chroot-login are similar to what pbuilder, cowbuilder, schroot, debspawn and similar tools do.

They only take a chroot name, and default the rest of paths to where nspawn-runner expects things to be under /var/lib/nspawn-runner.

gitlab-runner setup

nspawn-runner toml <chroot-name> outputs a snippet to add to /etc/gitlab-runner/config.toml to configure the CI.

For example:`

$ ./nspawn-runner toml buster
[[runners]]
  name="buster"
  url="TODO"
  token="TODO"
  executor = "custom"
  builds_dir = "/var/lib/nspawn-runner/.build"
  cache_dir = "/var/lib/nspawn-runner/.cache"
  [runners.custom_build_dir]
  [runners.cache]
    [runners.cache.s3]
    [runners.cache.gcs]
    [runners.cache.azure]
  [runners.custom]
    config_exec = "/home/enrico/…/nspawn-runner/nspawn-runner"
    config_args = ["gitlab-config"]
    config_exec_timeout = 200
    prepare_exec = "/home/enrico/…/nspawn-runner/nspawn-runner"
    prepare_args = ["prepare", "buster"]
    prepare_exec_timeout = 200
    run_exec = "/home/enrico/dev/nspawn-runner/nspawn-runner"
    run_args = ["run"]
    cleanup_exec = "/home/enrico/…/nspawn-runner/nspawn-runner"
    cleanup_args = ["cleanup"]
    cleanup_exec_timeout = 200
    graceful_kill_timeout = 200
    force_kill_timeout = 200

One needs to remember to set url and token, and the runner is configured.

The end, for now

This is it, it works! Time will tell what issues or ideas will come up: for now, it's a pretty decent first version.

The various prepare, run, cleanup steps are generic enough that they can be used outside of gitlab-runner: feel free to build on them, and drop me a note if you find this useful!

Updated: Issues noticed so far, that could go into a new version: