Isn't one of the main selling points of Gitlab their built-in CI? Anyone using Gitlab use an external CI?

As a long-time GitLab CI user, I do miss how the local circleci runner binary just worked. I am aware of gitlab-runner but it is a sick joke designed to mislead folks who just skim the docs into believing that they have a local execution story

Or, I guess a more conciliatory stance is: wow, folks must be using some pretty hello-world pipelines if `gitlab-runner exec` works for you

We provision our self-hosted runners via Terraform and GitLab's Helm chart. It's a relatively painless setup, but obviously not a few button clicks and commands

> a local execution story

I can see how "local" can have multiple meanings, but here I meant "as a developer on my laptop, can I have local docker run things the way GL is going to run things?"

I hear people say a lot "oh, I just use shell scripts, NBD" but as I said, I'm sure for hello-world setups which don't have any includes or take advantage of GLCI constructs that can work fine, but what rubs me the wrong way is that "gitlab-runner exec" doesn't say "just use shell scripts," it says "gitlab-runner exec - execute a build locally" and it for sure does not do that

Yeah this is a pain point for me as well, especially when developing the pipelines themselves. There's no good way to run it on my own machine, so I'm stuck pushing new commits to Gitlab over and over again and waiting for it to complete, or rather fail so I can troubleshoot the new error.

But yes, your observation is my whole complaint: it is not _reasonable_ to ask a GLCI developer to run a local copy of GL, complete with any shared GLCI template repos, in a local docker container just to have local execution. Maybe I wouldn't complain about it so much had I not started with circleci so long ago and had such a "wow, this is amazing" followed by gitlab-runner's :troll_face: -- to say nothing of GitHub Actions just straight up ignoring that whole demographic and hoping https://github.com/nektos/act emulates enough to have people not notice the massive feature gap