SSH

Tier: Free, Premium, Ultimate
Offering: GitLab.com, GitLab Self-Managed, GitLab Dedicated

The SSH executor supports only scripts generated in Bash and the caching feature is not supported.

This executor allows you to execute builds on a remote machine by executing commands over SSH.

Ensure you meet common prerequisites on any remote systems where GitLab Runner uses the SSH executor.

Use the SSH executor

To use the SSH executor, specify executor = "ssh" in the [runners.ssh] section. For example:

[[runners]]
  executor = "ssh"
  [runners.ssh]
    host = "example.com"
    port = "22"
    user = "root"
    password = "password"
    identity_file = "/path/to/identity/file"

You can use password or identity_file or both to authenticate against the server. GitLab Runner doesn’t implicitly read identity_file from /home/user/.ssh/id_(rsa|dsa|ecdsa). The identity_file needs to be explicitly specified.

The project’s source is checked out to: ~/builds/<short-token>/<concurrent-id>/<namespace>/<project-name>.

Where:

<short-token> is a shortened version of the runner’s token (first 8 letters)
<concurrent-id> is a unique number, identifying the local job ID on the particular runner in context of the project
<namespace> is the namespace where the project is stored on GitLab
<project-name> is the name of the project as it is stored on GitLab

To overwrite the ~/builds directory, specify the builds_dir options under [[runners]] section in config.toml.

If you want to upload job artifacts, install gitlab-runner on the host you are connecting to through SSH.

Configure strict host key checking

SSH StrictHostKeyChecking is enabled by default. To disable SSH StrictHostKeyChecking, set [runners.ssh.disable_strict_host_key_checking] to true. The current default value is false.