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stage | group | info | comments | type |
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Verify | Runner | To determine the technical writer assigned to the Stage/Group associated with this page, see https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/engineering/ux/technical-writing/#assignments | false | index |
Services
The services
keyword defines a Docker image that runs during a job
linked to the Docker image that the image keyword defines. This allows
you to access the service image during build time.
The service image can run any application, but the most common use case is to run a database container, for example:
It's easier and faster to use an existing image and run it as an additional container
than to install mysql
, for example, every time the project is built.
You're not limited to only database services. You can add as many
services you need to .gitlab-ci.yml
or manually modify config.toml
.
Any image found at Docker Hub or your private Container Registry can be
used as a service.
Services inherit the same DNS servers, search domains, and additional hosts as the CI container itself.
How services are linked to the job
To better understand how container linking works, read Linking containers together.
If you add mysql
as service to your application, the image is
used to create a container that's linked to the job container.
The service container for MySQL is accessible under the hostname mysql
.
To access your database service, connect to the host named mysql
instead of a
socket or localhost
. Read more in accessing the services.
How the health check of services works
Services are designed to provide additional features which are network accessible.
They may be a database like MySQL, or Redis, and even docker:stable-dind
which
allows you to use Docker-in-Docker. It can be practically anything that's
required for the CI/CD job to proceed, and is accessed by network.
To make sure this works, the runner:
- Checks which ports are exposed from the container by default.
- Starts a special container that waits for these ports to be accessible.
If the second stage of the check fails, it prints the warning: *** WARNING: Service XYZ probably didn't start properly
.
This issue can occur because:
- There is no opened port in the service.
- The service was not started properly before the timeout, and the port is not responding.
In most cases it affects the job, but there may be situations when the job still succeeds even if that warning was printed. For example:
- The service was started shortly after the warning was raised, and the job is not using the linked service from the beginning. In that case, when the job needed to access the service, it may have been already there waiting for connections.
- The service container is not providing any networking service, but it's doing
something with the job's directory (all services have the job directory mounted
as a volume under
/builds
). In that case, the service does its job, and because the job is not trying to connect to it, it does not fail.
What services are not for
As mentioned before, this feature is designed to provide network accessible services. A database is the simplest example of such a service.
The services feature is not designed to, and does not, add any software from the
defined services
image(s) to the job's container.
For example, if you have the following services
defined in your job, the php
,
node
or go
commands are not available for your script, and the job fails:
job:
services:
- php:7
- node:latest
- golang:1.10
image: alpine:3.7
script:
- php -v
- node -v
- go version
If you need to have php
, node
and go
available for your script, you should
either:
- Choose an existing Docker image that contains all required tools.
- Create your own Docker image, with all the required tools included, and use that in your job.
Define services
in the .gitlab-ci.yml
file
It's also possible to define different images and services per job:
default:
before_script:
- bundle install
test:2.6:
image: ruby:2.6
services:
- postgres:11.7
script:
- bundle exec rake spec
test:2.7:
image: ruby:2.7
services:
- postgres:12.2
script:
- bundle exec rake spec
Or you can pass some extended configuration options
for image
and services
:
default:
image:
name: ruby:2.6
entrypoint: ["/bin/bash"]
services:
- name: my-postgres:11.7
alias: db-postgres
entrypoint: ["/usr/local/bin/db-postgres"]
command: ["start"]
before_script:
- bundle install
test:
script:
- bundle exec rake spec
Accessing the services
Let's say that you need a Wordpress instance to test some API integration with
your application. You can then use for example the
tutum/wordpress
image in your
.gitlab-ci.yml
file:
services:
- tutum/wordpress:latest
If you don't specify a service alias,
when the job runs, tutum/wordpress
is started. You have
access to it from your build container under two hostnames:
tutum-wordpress
tutum__wordpress
Hostnames with underscores are not RFC valid and may cause problems in third-party applications.
The default aliases for the service's hostname are created from its image name following these rules:
- Everything after the colon (
:
) is stripped. - Slash (
/
) is replaced with double underscores (__
) and the primary alias is created. - Slash (
/
) is replaced with a single dash (-
) and the secondary alias is created (requires GitLab Runner v1.1.0 or higher).
To override the default behavior, you can specify a service alias.
Passing CI/CD variables to services
You can also pass custom CI/CD variables
to fine tune your Docker images
and services
directly in the .gitlab-ci.yml
file.
For more information, read about .gitlab-ci.yml
defined variables.
# The following variables are automatically passed down to the Postgres container
# as well as the Ruby container and available within each.
variables:
HTTPS_PROXY: "https://10.1.1.1:8090"
HTTP_PROXY: "https://10.1.1.1:8090"
POSTGRES_DB: "my_custom_db"
POSTGRES_USER: "postgres"
POSTGRES_PASSWORD: "example"
PGDATA: "/var/lib/postgresql/data"
POSTGRES_INITDB_ARGS: "--encoding=UTF8 --data-checksums"
services:
- name: postgres:11.7
alias: db
entrypoint: ["docker-entrypoint.sh"]
command: ["postgres"]
image:
name: ruby:2.6
entrypoint: ["/bin/bash"]
before_script:
- bundle install
test:
script:
- bundle exec rake spec
Available settings for services
Introduced in GitLab and GitLab Runner 9.4.
Setting | Required | GitLab version | Description |
---|---|---|---|
name |
yes, when used with any other option | 9.4 | Full name of the image to use. It should contain the Registry part if needed. |
entrypoint |
no | 9.4 | Command or script to execute as the container's entrypoint. It's translated to Docker's --entrypoint option while creating the container. The syntax is similar to Dockerfile 's ENTRYPOINT directive, where each shell token is a separate string in the array. |
command |
no | 9.4 | Command or script that should be used as the container's command. It's translated to arguments passed to Docker after the image's name. The syntax is similar to Dockerfile 's CMD directive, where each shell token is a separate string in the array. |
alias (1) |
no | 9.4 | Additional alias that can be used to access the service from the job's container. Read Accessing the services for more information. |
(1) Alias support for the Kubernetes executor was introduced in GitLab Runner 12.8, and is only available for Kubernetes version 1.7 or later.
Starting multiple services from the same image
Introduced in GitLab and GitLab Runner 9.4. Read more about the extended configuration options.
Before the new extended Docker configuration options, the following configuration would not work properly:
services:
- mysql:latest
- mysql:latest
The runner would start two containers, each that uses the mysql:latest
image.
However, both of them would be added to the job's container with the mysql
alias, based on
the default hostname naming. This would end with one
of the services not being accessible.
After the new extended Docker configuration options, the above example would look like:
services:
- name: mysql:latest
alias: mysql-1
- name: mysql:latest
alias: mysql-2
The runner still starts two containers using the mysql:latest
image,
however now each of them are also accessible with the alias configured
in .gitlab-ci.yml
file.
Setting a command for the service
Introduced in GitLab and GitLab Runner 9.4. Read more about the extended configuration options.
Let's assume you have a super/sql:latest
image with some SQL database
in it. You would like to use it as a service for your job. Let's also
assume that this image does not start the database process while starting
the container. The user needs to manually use /usr/bin/super-sql run
as
a command to start the database.
Before the new extended Docker configuration options, you would need to:
-
Create your own image based on the
super/sql:latest
image. -
Add the default command.
-
Use the image in the job's configuration:
# my-super-sql:latest image's Dockerfile FROM super/sql:latest CMD ["/usr/bin/super-sql", "run"]
# .gitlab-ci.yml services: - my-super-sql:latest
After the new extended Docker configuration options, you can
set a command
in the .gitlab-ci.yml
file instead:
# .gitlab-ci.yml
services:
- name: super/sql:latest
command: ["/usr/bin/super-sql", "run"]
The syntax of command
is similar to Dockerfile's CMD
.
How Docker integration works
Below is a high level overview of the steps performed by Docker during job time.
- Create any service container:
mysql
,postgresql
,mongodb
,redis
. - Create a cache container to store all volumes as defined in
config.toml
andDockerfile
of build image (ruby:2.6
as in above example). - Create a build container and link any service container to build container.
- Start the build container, and send a job script to the container.
- Run the job script.
- Checkout code in:
/builds/group-name/project-name/
. - Run any step defined in
.gitlab-ci.yml
. - Check the exit status of build script.
- Remove the build container and all created service containers.
Debug a job locally
The following commands are run without root privileges. You should be able to run Docker with your regular user account.
First start with creating a file named build_script
:
cat <<EOF > build_script
git clone https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-runner.git /builds/gitlab-org/gitlab-runner
cd /builds/gitlab-org/gitlab-runner
make
EOF
Here we use as an example the GitLab Runner repository which contains a
Makefile, so running make
executes the commands defined in the Makefile.
Instead of make
, you could run the command which is specific to your project.
Then create some service containers:
docker run -d --name service-mysql mysql:latest
docker run -d --name service-postgres postgres:latest
This creates two service containers, named service-mysql
and
service-postgres
which use the latest MySQL and PostgreSQL images
respectively. They both run in the background (-d
).
Finally, create a build container by executing the build_script
file we
created earlier:
docker run --name build -i --link=service-mysql:mysql --link=service-postgres:postgres ruby:2.6 /bin/bash < build_script
The above command creates a container named build
that's spawned from
the ruby:2.6
image and has two services linked to it. The build_script
is
piped using stdin
to the bash interpreter which in turn executes the
build_script
in the build
container.
When you finish testing and no longer need the containers, you can remove them with:
docker rm -f -v build service-mysql service-postgres
This forcefully (-f
) removes the build
container, the two service
containers, and all volumes (-v
) that were created with the container
creation.