Troubleshooting workspaces

When working with GitLab workspaces, you might encounter the following issues.

Error: Failed to renew lease

When creating a workspace, you might encounter the following error message in the agent’s log: 

{"level":"info","time":"2023-01-01T00:00:00.000Z","msg":"failed to renew lease gitlab-agent-remote-dev-dev/agent-123XX-lock: timed out waiting for the condition\n","agent_id":XXXX}

The error is because of a known issue in the GitLab agent for Kubernetes. This error occurs when an agent instance cannot renew its leadership lease, causing leader-only modules like remote_development to shut down.

To resolve this issue:

  1. Restart the agent instance.
  2. If the issue persists, check your Kubernetes cluster’s health and connectivity.

Error: No agents available to create workspaces

When you create a workspace in a project, you might get the following error: 

No agents available to create workspaces. Please consult Workspaces documentation for troubleshooting.

To resolve this issue:

  1. Check agent configuration:

    • Verify the remote_development module is enabled in your agent configuration: 

      remote_development:
  enabled: true
      • If the remote_development module is disabled for the GitLab agent, set enabled to true.

  2. Check permissions:

    • Ensure you have at least the Developer role for both the workspace project and agent project.
      • If you do not have at least the Developer role for the workspace and agent projects, contact your administrator.
    • Verify the agent is allowed in an ancestor group of your workspace project.
      • If the ancestor groups of the project do not have an allowed agent, allow an agent for any of these groups.

  3. Check agent logs: 

    kubectl logs -f -l app=gitlab-agent -n gitlab-workspaces