Hosted runners on Linux

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Hosted runners on Linux for GitLab.com run on Google Cloud Compute Engine. Each job gets a fully isolated, ephemeral virtual machine (VM). The default region is us-east1.

Each VM uses the Google Container-Optimized OS (COS) and the latest version of Docker Engine running the docker+machine executor. The machine type and underlying processor type might change. Jobs optimized for a specific processor design might behave inconsistently.

Untagged jobs will run on the small Linux x86-64 runner.

Machine types available for Linux - x86-64

GitLab offers the following machine types for hosted runners on Linux x86-64.

Machine types available for Linux - Arm64

GitLab offers the following machine type for hosted runners on Linux Arm64.

Container images

As runners on Linux are using the docker+machine executor, you can choose any container image by defining the image in your .gitlab-ci.yml file. Please be mindful that the selected Docker image is compatible with the underlying processor architecture.

If no image is set, the default is ruby:3.1.

Docker in Docker support

The runners are configured to run in privileged mode to support Docker in Docker to build Docker images natively or run multiple containers within your isolated job.

Example .gitlab-ci.yml file

To use a machine type other than small, add a tags: keyword to your job. For example:

job_small:
  script:
    - echo "This job is untagged and runs on the default small Linux x86-64 instance"

job_medium:
  tags:
    - saas-linux-medium-amd64
  script:
    - echo "This job runs on the medium Linux x86-64 instance"

job_large:
  tags:
    - saas-linux-large-arm64
  script:
    - echo "This job runs on the large Linux Arm64 instance"

Pre-clone script (removed)

This feature was deprecated in GitLab 15.9 and removed in 17.0. Use pre_get_sources_script instead.