While setting up a Windows CI pipeline from GitLab, I was going through the numerous issues related to the Windows gitlab-runner docker executor that is using an old API (1.18) which Docker no longer accepts.
The issue results in the following error messages when the Gitlab/CI tries to connect to the runner:
Running with gitlab-runner 11.2.0 (35e8515d) on Windows VS2017 x64 0825d1d7
Using Docker executor with image buildtools2017 ...
ERROR: Preparation failed: Error response from daemon: **client version 1.18 is too old.** Minimum supported API version is 1.24, please upgrade your client to a newer version (executor_docker.go:1148:0s)
The 'buildtools2017' docker image that is referred to is the Microsoft "official".
The image seems to be working and valid for the current (experimental) Docker version I'm using (18.06.1-ce-win74) and for the stable version as well.
The issue was described throughout the GitLab wiki. Andrew Leech (?) went so far as to fork and modify the runner so that it would connect properly, and kindly provided his scripts and comments in a blogpost. This seems to give some results:
C:\gitlab-runner>gitlab-runner.exe -v
Version: 10.8.0~beta.551.g67a6ccc7
Git revision: 67a6ccc7
Git branch: windows-container-executor
GO version: go1.9.4
Built: 2018-07-30T08:57:44+00:00
OS/Arch: windows/amd64
The GitLab wiki states that they're waiting until a more stable solution can be released. Currently it's been over one year of broken windows docker runners..
Andrew's blogpost and a link to his gitlab-runner.exe describes actually a different workaround using the PowerShell runner that then starts a Docker instance. All the token info is exposed, I'm not sure how to set it up, and it also seems to rely on an external image with older build tools.
It seems the docker runner now connects, but if I undestand correctly, the Gitlab-runner docker runner does not seem to agree on the 'build directory' that is used. The first Gitlab/CI scriptline in my repo is just an echo command, so the error is not about the ci script content, but I'm not sure what it IS about. If anyone with docker fu knows what is going on this would really help me.
Using Docker executor with image buildtools2017 ...
ERROR: Preparation failed: build directory needs to be absolute and non-root path
Cheers,
Copyright Notice：Content Author:「StarShine」，Reproduced under the CC 4.0 BY-SA copyright license with a link to the original source and this disclaimer.
Link to original article：https://stackoverflow.com/questions/52296826/windows-docker-api-issue-for-using-gitlab-runner