Rather simple fix for this, need to make sure the CI job is using an image that contains the docker cli executable. Edit your .gitlab-ci.yml and make sure you have:
image: docker:latest
From this post.
GitLab Runner with Docker executor: “client version 1.43 is too old”
Setting up a Docker image build in my GitLab ci I got this error:
ERROR: Error response from daemon: client version 1.43 is too old. Minimum supported API version is 1.44, please upgrade your client to a newer version: driver not connecting
Docker version on the VM running the GitLab Runner:
$ docker --version
Docker version 29.1.3, build f52814d
Versions in my .gitlab-ci.yml:
image: docker:24.0.5-cli services: - docker:24.0.5-dind
Updated both to match the Docker version on the VM resolved the issue.
gitlab-runner unable to pull repos (host not found)
I’ve set up a new gitlab-runner on my homelab GitLab server. It’s using a Docker executer, and when it attempts to pull the repo to build, it’s gets error:
Could not resolve host: gitlab.local (Domain name not found)
gitlab.local is in /etc/hosts on the VM and I can ping the name and it resolves. A quick Google found this post, and the suggestion is to edit /etc/gitlab-runner/config.toml and add:
network_mode = "host"
to the [runners.docker] section. Seems like that fixes the issue.
Site update: Migrating hosting providers – automating deployment with Terraform, Ansible and GitLab CI Pipelines
Over the past couple of years I’ve been working on and off on a personal project to migrate and update a GitLab CI pipeline on my self-hosted GitLab for building and deploying this site. Unfortunately my self-hosted GitLab used to be on a e-waste HP DL380 G7 rack server that I no longer have after moving house, so I’ve gone back to using my old 2008 MacPro 3,1 as a Proxmox server, where I now run GitLab (which oddly is what I first used this Mac for several years ago).
As part of the update, I wanted to achieve a couple of goals:
- update the GitLab pipeline to deploy to a staging server for testing, and then deploy to the live server
- template any deployment files that are server/domain specific
- update my Docker images for WordPress, updating the plugins, and anything that needs to be in the image to support the runtime, e.g. nginx, php plugins for nginx etc.
- move to a new cloud provider that would allow me to provision VMs with Terraform
- automate updating SSL certs with Let’s Encrypt certbot
I won’t share my completed pipeline because I don’t want to share specifics about how my WordPress site is configured, but I’ll give an overview of what I used to automate various parts of it:
- Terraform to provision my VMs on Hetzner – 2CPU/4GB VMs are pretty good value
- Ansible to template nginx and WordPress domain specific configs
- GitLab CI pipeline to automate all the steps
While I’ve ended up with a working solution that meets my goals (I can run the pipeline to deploy to my test server or deploy latest to my new live server), I still have a few areas I could improve:
- GitLab CI Environments, and parameterization – I don’t feel I’ve taken enough advantage of these yet. The jobs that deploy to my test server run automatically, but the deploy to my live set is the same set of jobs that I manually run, and configured to deploy to a different server – I feel there’s more I can parameterize here and need to do some more experimentation in this area
Although this effort was spread over a couple of years before I got to a point of completion, it was a great opportunity to gain some more experience across all these tools.