Introduction to Manage Runners

Welcome to the official documentation for Manage Runners. Our platform helps you provision, scale, and manage GitLab CI/CD runners on Hetzner Cloud effortlessly.

Why Manage Runners?

Running your own CI infrastructure can be painful. You need to provision VMs, install dependencies, configure GitLab Runner, and keep the OS up to date. If you leave servers running 24/7, your cloud bill balloons.

Manage Runners solves this by:

Automating the setup: Enter your Hetzner API key and GitLab Runner Token, and we handle the rest.
Smart Scheduling: Automatically spin down runners nights and weekends to save up to 50% on compute costs.
Static IPs: Runners retain their IP addresses even when paused, making firewall configurations simple.

Prerequisites

Before you begin, you will need a Hetzner Cloud account and a GitLab Runner registration token.

Quick Architecture Overview

We do not proxy your CI traffic. Your GitLab instance communicates directly with your Hetzner servers. Our control plane is only responsible for the lifecycle (create, update, schedule, pause, delete) of the VMs.

Code Example

By default, we configure your runners with the Docker executor. You can use any public or private Docker image as your CI environment:

# .gitlab-ci.yml
build-job:
  image: node:18
  tags:
    - hetzner-cpx11
  script:
    - npm ci
    - npm run build

Next Steps

Ready to deploy your first runner? Head over to the Quick Start guide to connect your accounts and spin up your first Hetzner server.

Documentation