SaaS runners on Linux (FREE SAAS)

When you run jobs on SaaS runners on Linux, the runners are on auto-scaled ephemeral virtual machine (VM) instances. The default region for the VMs is us-east1.

Each VM uses the Google Container-Optimized OS (COS) and the latest version of Docker Engine running the docker+machine executor.

Machine types available for Linux (x86-64)

For the SaaS runners on Linux, GitLab offers a range of machine types for use. For Free, Premium, and Ultimate plan customers, jobs on these instances consume the compute quota allocated to your namespace.

The small machine type is set as default. If no tag keyword in your .gitlab-ci.yml file is specified, the jobs will run on this default runner.

There are different rates of compute minutes consumption, based on the type of machine that is used.

All SaaS runners on Linux currently run on n2d-standard general-purpose compute from GCP. The machine type and underlying processor type can change. Jobs optimized for a specific processor design could behave inconsistently.

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.

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.

Caching on SaaS runners

The SaaS runners share a distributed cache stored in a Google Cloud Storage (GCS) bucket. Cache contents not updated in the last 14 days are automatically removed, based on the object lifecycle management policy. The maximum size of an uploaded cache artifact can be 5 GB after the cache becomes a compressed archive.

For more information about how caching works, see Caching in GitLab CI/CD.

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 runs on the default (small) Linux instance"

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

job_large:
 tags:
  - saas-linux-large-amd64
 script:
  - echo "this job runs on the large Linux instance"

SaaS runners for GitLab community contributions

If you want to contribute to GitLab, jobs will be picked up by the gitlab-shared-runners-manager-X.gitlab.com fleet of runners, dedicated for GitLab projects and related community forks.

These runners are backed by the same machine type as our small runners. Unlike the most commonly used SaaS runners on Linux, each virtual machine is re-used up to 40 times.

As we want to encourage people to contribute, these runners are free of charge.

Pre-clone script (deprecated)

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