I set up a Windows GitLab runner that’s supposed to download a Docker image from our Container Registry and then run a build script in the pipeline. Unfortunately the Docker container never launches due to the following error:
Running with gitlab-runner 15.1.0 (76984217)
on WindowsDockerRunner wZMWQZYi
Resolving secrets
Preparing the "docker-windows" executor
Using Docker executor with image mcr.microsoft.com/windows/servercore:ltsc2019 ...
Pulling docker image mcr.microsoft.com/windows/servercore:ltsc2019 ...
Using docker image sha256:e6b07227af5ca9303c2112b574f6f27f38135bbf9df29d829142410221967401 for mcr.microsoft.com/windows/servercore:ltsc2019 with digest mcr.microsoft.com/windows/servercore@sha256:26c6c296a4737ba478fe3c3e531b098f89b5562c40b416ba6fb8177ac462d1af ...
Preparing environment
Running on RUNNER-WZMWQZYI via
runner2...
ERROR: Job failed (system failure): prepare environment: Error response from daemon: invalid condition: "not-running". Check https://docs.gitlab.com/runner/shells/index.html#shell-profile-loading for more information
The error message doesn’t clearly state what the cause of the problem is and the documentation that it references doesn’t mention anything about "condition". Based on the link pointing to shell profiles I suspect it might have something to do with the shell that’s being run, but when I run the Docker container locally it boots into PowerShell just fine.
Does anyone know how to solve this?
3
Answers
Was finally able to solve this issue. We had the Docker Engine installed on our GitLab Runner, but that doesn't seem to be sufficient for GitLab CI/CD. After installing Docker Desktop on the runner the issue disappeared and we were able to run the pipeline.
After some trial and error I got it up and running.
I have another server running the gitlab-runner and docker without any issues (no docker desktop installed, which is not allowed because of licensing stuff).
The server I’m trying to setup right now is a ‘redundancy’ build server.
So to find out what was my problem, I started switching things from one build server to the other. Currently, it appears that simply downgrading to the gitlab-runner V13.4.0 was enough.
I did reregister the runner, since gitlab stated that the V15.x.x version was using executor "unknown".
Not sure what is going on there, but at least I can continue building now.
I came across this issue after installing Docker Engine using the Windows Server install script, which fetches docker.exe and dockerd.exe from https://master.dockerproject.org, These builds were last updated in March 2022, I found gitlab-runner 14.9 and earlier work okay with this version (released prior to March 2022), but 14.10 does not (released 2022-04-19) nor do any newer versions.
Installing Docker Desktop resolves this as it provides the latest version. However using Docker Desktop introduces licensing issues. An alternative is to manually install Docker Engine / update the version downloaded by the Microsoft script.
Docker Engine builds are provided on the Moby GitHub project to download from https://download.docker.com/win/static/stable/x86_64/ downloading the lastest version from here and replacing the docker executables in
C:WindowsSystem32fixes the problem, working with the latest gitlab-runner.An alternative is to use the docker-engine chocolatey package (which incidentally I maintain) which provides installation scripting for the above stable builds:
There is also an open issue with the Windows-Containers team to move off (out of date) nightlies: https://github.com/microsoft/Windows-Containers/issues/256 which would provide a stable docker build, through the Microsoft recommended installation method.