GitLab CI officially supports (recent versions of) these Linux distributions:

• Ubuntu Linux
• Debian/GNU Linux

Additionally GitLab CI requires:

• GitLab 6.0+
• ruby 1.9.3
• MySQL or PostgreSQL

If you want to use GitLab CI without GitLab or with older versions of GitLab you need to use 2-2-stable

The following features are not in GitLab CI but merge requests are very welcome:

• Email notification
• API documentation
• Increase test coverage (the goal is to be above 85%)
• Build artifacts access
• Build pipeline / build promotion actions

GitLab CI is a web application with an API and it connect to the db. It manage projects/builds and provides a nice user interface. It uses the GitLab application API to authenticate users.

GitLab CI Runner is a pure ruby application which processes builds. It can be deployed separately and works with GitLab CI through an API.

In order to run tests you need at least 1 GitLab CI instance and 1 GitLab CI Runner. However, for running several builds at the same time you may want to setup more than one GitLab CI Runner.

Possible Cases:

• 1 GitLab CI and N GitLab CI Runner instances on same machine
• 1 GitLab CI and N GitLab CI Runner instances on different machines
• 1 GitLab CI and N GitLab CI Runner instances on local machines

For more information see: Announcing GitLab CI 3.0 and Integrating GitLab CI With GitLab to Enable Distributed Builds

• Installation guide

1. Log in the GitLab CI web interface
2. Press the 'Sync now' button
3. Select your project with the 'Add' button
4. Go to the settings page of the project and add a build script (example given below)
5. Go the the Integration page and do the 'Complete (as service)' steps, the press 'Test settings'
6. A new build should become visible on the project page of GitLab CI
7. If the build fails then adjust the build script and press the 'Retry' button on the build page
8. If the build is green you are done, all new commits will be tested and you see the status of merge requests builds within GitLab

For your information, the runner runs the line below before it runs the commands in your build script:

cd /gitlab-ci-runner/tmp/builds && git clone git@gitlab_server_fqdn:group/project.git project-1 && cd project-1 && git checkout master

Build script example:

bundle install
bundle exec rake db:create RAILS_ENV=test
bundle exec rake db:migrate RAILS_ENV=test
script/run_all_tests

• Feedback and suggestions forum is the place to propose and discuss new features for GitLab CI.