After having had trouble with my Gitlab Runner, I decided to put together a plan for creating runners more automatically, thus this Terraform configuration.

This plan assumes running a Gitlab Runner, Docker Executor on a DigitalOcean droplet. Running this plan requires an active DigitalOcean account, a configured SSH key that will be installed on any created droplet, and a DigitalOcean personal access token (PAT).

Creating the runner

Before creating the runner, we run a plan to ensure we are creating the droplet that we expect. First, we will export our access token as an environment variable:

export DO_PAT="$(cat ~/.config/doctl/config.yaml | yq e '.access-token' -)"

Then we can run our plan:

terraform plan \
  -var "do_token=${DO_PAT}" \
  -var "pvt_key=${HOME}/.ssh/id_rsa" \
  -var "ssh_key=${KEYNAME}" \
  -var "reg_key=${GITLAB_REG_KEY}"

If the output is what was expected, we may now create the droplet:

terraform apply \
  -var "do_token=${DO_PAT}" \
  -var "pvt_key=${HOME}/.ssh/id_rsa" \
  -var "ssh_key=${KEYNAME}"
  -var "reg_key=${GITLAB_REG_KEY}"

Destroying the runner

terraform destroy \
  -var "do_token=${DO_PAT}" \
  -var "pvt_key=${HOME}/.ssh/id_rsa" \
  -var "ssh_key=${KEYNAME}"