// blog
Blog
News, guides, and product updates from RocketRunner.
// gitlab
6 min
GitLab CE Comes Without a Runner: Why Nothing Executes Your Pipelines
A fresh self-managed GitLab installs the whole CI/CD system and zero runners, so your first pipeline sits pending forever. Here is why that is by design, how to confirm it in thirty seconds, and the three ways out.
Cyrille Sepele
Aug 12, 2026
// gitlab
5 min
How to Add a Runner to Self-Hosted GitLab: The Full Walkthrough
Registering a runner against your own GitLab instance, from installing the package to the first green pipeline, including the authentication-token change that broke every older tutorial and the mistakes that cost the most time.
Cyrille Sepele
Aug 11, 2026
// gitlab
5 min
GitLab Omnibus Runner Setup: Same Box or Separate, and the Traps Either Way
Omnibus installs GitLab and no runner. Whether you put the runner on the same server comes down to memory and blast radius, and if you do, there is a networking trap in gitlab.rb that will waste your afternoon.
Cyrille Sepele
Aug 10, 2026
// gitlab
6 min
This Job Is Stuck Because You Don't Have Any Active Runners Online: Every Cause
The message is about matching, not health. Your runner can be online and idle and still be skipped, because a job only runs on a runner that carries every tag it asks for, accepts the branch it came from, and is actually assigned to the project.
Cyrille Sepele
Jul 30, 2026
// gitlab
5 min
Self-Managed GitLab, Managed Runners: Keep Your Code In-House Without Running CI
Self-hosting is treated as all or nothing, but the repository and the build compute are separate decisions. Keep the instance in your perimeter, rent the runners, and you drop the ops burden without giving up the reason you self-hosted.
Cyrille Sepele
Jul 21, 2026
// gitlab
7 min
GitLab Runner Has Never Contacted This Instance: Every Cause and Fix
The message means registration worked but the runner never called home. That narrows the problem to five things: the process isn't running, it's reading a different config file, it can't reach your URL, TLS is failing, or the token belongs to someone else, including the case where gitlab-runner verify reports 'is valid' and GitLab still says the runner has never contacted it.
Cyrille Sepele
Jul 20, 2026
// gitlab
5 min
Adding an AI Coding Agent to GitLab: Claude Code, OpenCode, or @rocket
The agents are broadly interchangeable. What differs is the setup. Running Claude Code or OpenCode yourself means your YAML, your keys, and your runners. @rocket sets all of that up for you and runs it on a dedicated runner it provisions.
Cyrille Sepele
Jul 5, 2026
// gitlab
3 min
We Cut Our GitLab Build Time by 59% With One Change
Shared runners throw away your cache after every job. Move to a dedicated runner where the Docker layer cache and /cache volume persist, and the same build job drops from 1m54s to 47s.
Cyrille Sepele
May 16, 2026
// gitlab
3 min
Cheap Dedicated CI/CD Runners for GitLab: Shared vs Self-Hosted vs Rented
Shared runners queue and forget everything, self-hosting hides its real cost in ops time, and renting a dedicated runner by the hour sits in between, with full isolation, no setup, and pay-as-you-go pricing.
Cyrille Sepele
May 9, 2026