Services All tiers All offerings
When you configure CI/CD, you specify an image, which is used to create the container
where your jobs run. To specify this image, you use the image
keyword.
You can specify an additional image by using the services
keyword. This additional
image is used to create another container, which is available to the first container.
The two containers have access to one another and can communicate when running the job.
The service image can run any application, but the most common use case is to run a database container, for example:
- MySQL
- PostgreSQL
- Redis
- GitLab as an example for a microservice offering a JSON API
It’s easier and faster to use an existing image and run it as an additional container
than to install mysql
, for example, every time the project is built.
You’re not limited to only database services. You can add as many
services you need to .gitlab-ci.yml
or manually modify the config.toml
.
Any image found at Docker Hub or your private container registry can be
used as a service.
Services inherit the same DNS servers, search domains, and additional hosts as the CI container itself.
How services are linked to the job
To better understand how container linking works, read Linking containers together.
If you add mysql
as service to your application, the image is
used to create a container that’s linked to the job container.
The service container for MySQL is accessible under the hostname mysql
.
To access your database service, connect to the host named mysql
instead of a
socket or localhost
. Read more in accessing the services.
How the health check of services works
Services are designed to provide additional features which are network accessible.
They may be a database like MySQL, or Redis, and even docker:dind
which
allows you to use Docker-in-Docker. It can be practically anything that’s
required for the CI/CD job to proceed, and is accessed by network.
To make sure this works, the runner:
- Checks which ports are exposed from the container by default.
- Starts a special container that waits for these ports to be accessible.
If the second stage of the check fails, it prints the warning: *** WARNING: Service XYZ probably didn't start properly
.
This issue can occur because:
- There is no opened port in the service.
- The service was not started properly before the timeout, and the port is not responding.
In most cases it affects the job, but there may be situations when the job still succeeds even if that warning was printed. For example:
- The service was started shortly after the warning was raised, and the job is not using the linked service from the beginning. In that case, when the job needed to access the service, it may have been already there waiting for connections.
- The service container is not providing any networking service, but it’s doing
something with the job’s directory (all services have the job directory mounted
as a volume under
/builds
). In that case, the service does its job, and because the job is not trying to connect to it, it does not fail.
If the services start successfully, they start before the
before_script
runs. This means you can
write a before_script
that queries the service.
Services stop at the end of the job, even if the job fails.
What services are not for
As mentioned before, this feature is designed to provide network accessible services. A database is the simplest example of such a service.
The services feature is not designed to, and does not, add any software from the
defined services
images to the job’s container.
For example, if you have the following services
defined in your job, the php
,
node
or go
commands are not available for your script, and the job fails:
job:
services:
- php:7
- node:latest
- golang:1.10
image: alpine:3.7
script:
- php -v
- node -v
- go version
If you need to have php
, node
and go
available for your script, you should
either:
- Choose an existing Docker image that contains all required tools.
- Create your own Docker image, with all the required tools included, and use that in your job.
Define services
in the .gitlab-ci.yml
file
It’s also possible to define different images and services per job:
default:
before_script:
- bundle install
test:2.6:
image: ruby:2.6
services:
- postgres:11.7
script:
- bundle exec rake spec
test:2.7:
image: ruby:2.7
services:
- postgres:12.2
script:
- bundle exec rake spec
Or you can pass some extended configuration options
for image
and services
:
default:
image:
name: ruby:2.6
entrypoint: ["/bin/bash"]
services:
- name: my-postgres:11.7
alias: db-postgres
entrypoint: ["/usr/local/bin/db-postgres"]
command: ["start"]
before_script:
- bundle install
test:
script:
- bundle exec rake spec
Accessing the services
Let’s say that you need a Wordpress instance to test some API integration with
your application. You can then use for example the
tutum/wordpress
image in your
.gitlab-ci.yml
file:
services:
- tutum/wordpress:latest
If you don’t specify a service alias,
when the job runs, tutum/wordpress
is started. You have
access to it from your build container under two hostnames:
tutum-wordpress
tutum__wordpress
Hostnames with underscores are not RFC valid and may cause problems in third-party applications.
The default aliases for the service’s hostname are created from its image name following these rules:
- Everything after the colon (
:
) is stripped. - Slash (
/
) is replaced with double underscores (__
) and the primary alias is created. - Slash (
/
) is replaced with a single dash (-
) and the secondary alias is created (requires GitLab Runner v1.1.0 or later).
To override the default behavior, you can specify a service alias.
Connecting services
You can use inter-dependent services with complex jobs, like end-to-end tests where an external API needs to communicate with its own database.
For example, for an end-to-end test for a front-end application that uses an API, and where the API needs a database:
end-to-end-tests:
image: node:latest
services:
- name: selenium/standalone-firefox:${FIREFOX_VERSION}
alias: firefox
- name: registry.gitlab.com/organization/private-api:latest
alias: backend-api
- postgres:14.3
variables:
FF_NETWORK_PER_BUILD: 1
POSTGRES_PASSWORD: supersecretpassword
BACKEND_POSTGRES_HOST: postgres
script:
- npm install
- npm test
For this solution to work, you must use the networking mode that creates a new network for each job.
Passing CI/CD variables to services
You can also pass custom CI/CD variables
to fine tune your Docker images
and services
directly in the .gitlab-ci.yml
file.
For more information, read about .gitlab-ci.yml
defined variables.
# The following variables are automatically passed down to the Postgres container
# as well as the Ruby container and available within each.
variables:
HTTPS_PROXY: "https://10.1.1.1:8090"
HTTP_PROXY: "https://10.1.1.1:8090"
POSTGRES_DB: "my_custom_db"
POSTGRES_USER: "postgres"
POSTGRES_PASSWORD: "example"
PGDATA: "/var/lib/postgresql/data"
POSTGRES_INITDB_ARGS: "--encoding=UTF8 --data-checksums"
default:
services:
- name: postgres:11.7
alias: db
entrypoint: ["docker-entrypoint.sh"]
command: ["postgres"]
image:
name: ruby:2.6
entrypoint: ["/bin/bash"]
before_script:
- bundle install
test:
script:
- bundle exec rake spec
Available settings for services
Introduced in GitLab and GitLab Runner 9.4.
Setting | Required | GitLab version | Description |
---|---|---|---|
name
| yes, when used with any other option | 9.4 | Full name of the image to use. If the full image name includes a registry hostname, use the alias option to define a shorter service access name. For more information, see Accessing the services.
|
entrypoint
| no | 9.4 | Command or script to execute as the container’s entrypoint. It’s translated to the Docker --entrypoint option while creating the container. The syntax is similar to Dockerfile ’s ENTRYPOINT directive, where each shell token is a separate string in the array.
|
command
| no | 9.4 | Command or script that should be used as the container’s command. It’s translated to arguments passed to Docker after the image’s name. The syntax is similar to Dockerfile ’s CMD directive, where each shell token is a separate string in the array.
|
alias (1)
| no | 9.4 | Additional alias that can be used to access the service from the job’s container. Read Accessing the services for more information. |
variables (2)
| no | 14.5 | Additional environment variables that are passed exclusively to the service. The syntax is the same as Job Variables. Service variables cannot reference themselves. |
(1) Alias support for the Kubernetes executor was introduced in GitLab Runner 12.8, and is only available for Kubernetes version 1.7 or later.
(2) Service variables support for the Docker and the Kubernetes executor was introduced in GitLab Runner 14.8.
Starting multiple services from the same image
Introduced in GitLab and GitLab Runner 9.4. Read more about the extended configuration options.
Before the new extended Docker configuration options, the following configuration would not work properly:
services:
- mysql:latest
- mysql:latest
The runner would start two containers, each that uses the mysql:latest
image.
However, both of them would be added to the job’s container with the mysql
alias, based on
the default hostname naming. This would end with one
of the services not being accessible.
After the new extended Docker configuration options, the above example would look like:
services:
- name: mysql:latest
alias: mysql-1
- name: mysql:latest
alias: mysql-2
The runner still starts two containers using the mysql:latest
image,
however now each of them are also accessible with the alias configured
in .gitlab-ci.yml
file.
Setting a command for the service
Introduced in GitLab and GitLab Runner 9.4. Read more about the extended configuration options.
Let’s assume you have a super/sql:latest
image with some SQL database
in it. You would like to use it as a service for your job. Let’s also
assume that this image does not start the database process while starting
the container. The user needs to manually use /usr/bin/super-sql run
as
a command to start the database.
Before the new extended Docker configuration options, you would need to:
- Create your own image based on the
super/sql:latest
image. - Add the default command.
-
Use the image in the job’s configuration.
-
my-super-sql:latest
image’s Dockerfile:FROM super/sql:latest CMD ["/usr/bin/super-sql", "run"]
-
In the job in the
.gitlab-ci.yml
:services: - my-super-sql:latest
-
After the new extended Docker configuration options, you can
set a command
in the .gitlab-ci.yml
file instead:
services:
- name: super/sql:latest
command: ["/usr/bin/super-sql", "run"]
The syntax of command
is similar to Dockerfile CMD
.
Using services
with docker run
(Docker-in-Docker) side-by-side
Containers started with docker run
can also connect to services provided by GitLab.
When booting the service is expensive or time consuming, you can use this technique to run tests from different client environments, while only booting up the tested service once.
access-service:
stage: build
image: docker:20.10.16
services:
- docker:dind # necessary for docker run
- tutum/wordpress:latest
variables:
FF_NETWORK_PER_BUILD: "true" # activate container-to-container networking
script: |
docker run --rm --name curl \
--volume "$(pwd)":"$(pwd)" \
--workdir "$(pwd)" \
--network=host \
curlimages/curl:7.74.0 curl "http://tutum-wordpress"
For this solution to work, you must:
- Use the networking mode that creates a new network for each job.
-
Not use the Docker executor with Docker socket binding.
If you must, then in the above example, instead of
host
, use the dynamic network name created for this job.
How Docker integration works
Below is a high level overview of the steps performed by Docker during job time.
- Create any service container:
mysql
,postgresql
,mongodb
,redis
. - Create a cache container to store all volumes as defined in
config.toml
andDockerfile
of build image (ruby:2.6
as in above example). - Create a build container and link any service container to build container.
- Start the build container, and send a job script to the container.
- Run the job script.
- Checkout code in:
/builds/group-name/project-name/
. - Run any step defined in
.gitlab-ci.yml
. - Check the exit status of build script.
- Remove the build container and all created service containers.
Capturing service container logs
Introduced in GitLab Runner 15.6.
Logs generated by applications running in service containers can be captured for subsequent examination and debugging. You might want to look at service container’s logs when the service container has started successfully, but is not behaving as expected, leading to job failures. The logs can indicate missing or incorrect configuration of the service within the container.
CI_DEBUG_SERVICES
should only be enabled when service containers are being actively debugged as there are both storage
and performance consequences to capturing service container logs.
To enable service logging, add the CI_DEBUG_SERVICES
variable to the project’s
.gitlab-ci.yml
file:
variables:
CI_DEBUG_SERVICES: "true"
Accepted values are:
- Enabled:
TRUE
,true
,True
- Disabled:
FALSE
,false
,False
Any other values result in an error message and effectively disable the feature.
When enabled, logs for all service containers are captured and streamed into the jobs trace log concurrently with other logs. Logs from each container are prefixed with the container’s aliases, and displayed in a different color.
CI_DEBUG_SERVICES
may result in masked variables being revealed. When CI_DEBUG_SERVICES
is enabled,
service container logs and the CI job’s logs are streamed to the job’s trace log concurrently, which makes it possible
for a service container log to be inserted inside a job’s masked log. This would thwart the variable masking mechanism
and result in the masked variable being revealed.Debug a job locally
The following commands are run without root privileges. You should be able to run Docker with your user account.
First start by creating a file named build_script
:
cat <<EOF > build_script
git clone https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-runner.git /builds/gitlab-org/gitlab-runner
cd /builds/gitlab-org/gitlab-runner
make runner-bin-host
EOF
Here we use as an example the GitLab Runner repository which contains a Makefile, so running make
executes the target
defined in the Makefile. Instead of make runner-bin-host
, you could run the command which is specific to your project.
Then create a service container:
docker run -d --name service-redis redis:latest
The previous command creates a service container named service-redis
using the latest Redis image. The service
container runs in the background (-d
).
Finally, create a build container by executing the build_script
file we created earlier:
docker run --name build -i --link=service-redis:redis golang:latest /bin/bash < build_script
The above command creates a container named build
that is spawned from the golang:latest
image and has one service
linked to it. The build_script
is piped using stdin
to the bash interpreter which in turn executes the
build_script
in the build
container.
When you finish testing and no longer need the containers, you can remove them with:
docker rm -f -v build service-redis
This forcefully (-f
) removes the build
container, the service container, and all volumes (-v
) that were created
with the container creation.
Security when using services containers
Docker privileged mode applies to services. This means that the service image container can access the host system. You should use container images from trusted sources only.
Shared /builds directory
The build directory is mounted as a volume under /builds
and is shared
between the job and services. The job checks the project out into
/builds/$CI_PROJECT_PATH
after the services are running. As a result, if your
service needs files from the project or, for example, wants to put files there
to serve as artifacts, it may need to wait for that directory to exist and
have $CI_COMMIT_SHA
checked out. Any changes made before the job finishes its
checkout process are removed by the checkout process.