gitlab: Runner is offline, last contact was about some hours ago

If you runner is run under systemd

journalctl -u gitlab-runner.service

may prove enlightening. It did in my case.

gitlab-runner[18449]: FATAL: chdir /home/gitlab-runner: no such file or directory

To me, the following solved the problem:

gitlab-runner restart

Where gitlab-runner is a symlink to gitlab-ci-multi-runner:

GitLab Runner is the open source project that is used to run your jobs and send the results back to GitLab. It is used in conjunction with GitLab CI, the open-source continuous integration service included with GitLab that coordinates the jobs.


This worked for me:

sudo gitlab-runner verify

since gitlab-runner restart didn't actually restarted runners


I don't why but I found the gitlab-runner was completely out of service. I've tried to fix it. at the first step, I've updated the gitlab-runner bit it didn't work. after that I decided to reinstall the gitlab-runner so I've met this steps:

  1. removing the gitlab-runner user with this command line: sudo deluser --remove-home gitlab-runner
  2. following the manual installation and configuration on here.

and it worked.