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Guide for Using Runners on git.nrw

Last updated: 19.02.2026 3 min Edit on GitLab
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Summary

GitLab Runners on git.nrw execute your CI/CD pipelines, automatically building, testing, and deploying your projects with each commit or merge. Please register and use group-/project runners if possible, as the number of instance runners is very limited and should only be used for testing purposes.

Runners are the agents that run the GitLab Runner application, to execute GitLab CI/CD jobs in a pipeline. They are responsible for running your builds, tests, deployments, and other CI/CD tasks defined in .gitlab-ci.yml files. In simple terms: your pipelines hand your code to an available runner, which takes your code to a predefined executor, which executes it in a predefined environment.

There are two different categories of runners:

  • group/project runners: assigned to a specific group/project, self-managed, uses resources of the machine the runners are managed from
  • instance runners: hosted by the instance of GitLab (git.nrw), uses resources of the servers where the git instance is managed from

While it may be easier to use the runners managed by git.nrw, we highly advise to use self-managed runners instead. The number of instance runners is very limited as to not increase the server load unnecessarily, which can result in long queues and even longer delays until your jobs and pipelines are being run.

Installing GitLab Runner

Runners usually process jobs on the same machine where you installed GitLab Runner. However, you can also have a runner process jobs in a container, in a Kubernetes cluster, or in auto-scaled instances in the cloud.

You can install GitLab Runner on:

Bleeding-edge binaries are also available.

You can install GitLab Runner with the following containers:

Registration of a project/group runner

After installing GitLab Runner, locate the runner authentication token in the config.toml file. Runner authentication tokens have the prefix, glrt-.

Depending on the operating system/container you use, please follow the instructions found in the GitLab Docs to register your runner .

During and after the registration there are a few options to characterize the created runner:

  • Executors - When registering a runner, you must choose an executor. An executor determines the environment each job runs in.
  • Tags - When a CI/CD job runs, it knows which runner to use by looking at the assigned tags. Tags are the only way to filter the list of available runners for a job.
  • Configuration - Configure a specific or all runners by editing the config.toml file.

For any further information or troubleshooting please visit the official GitLab Docs regarding runners .