nicole
289769a601
Automatic Documentation Deployment / Sync Docs to https://kb.bunny-lab.io (push) Successful in 8s
47 lines
5.2 KiB
Markdown
47 lines
5.2 KiB
Markdown
---
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draft: false
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date: 2025-05-16
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updated: 2026-09-05
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authors:
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- nicole
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categories:
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- General
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tags:
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- Blog
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- Containers
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- Docker
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- Portainer
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- Ansible
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---
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# Learning to Leverage Gitea Runners
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When I first started my journey with a GitOps mentality to transition a portion of my homelab's infrastructure to an "**Intrastructure-as-Code**" structure, I had made my own self-made Docker container that I called the [Git-Repo-Updater](<../../deployments/Containers/Docker/Git Repo Updater.md>). This self-made tool was useful to me because it copied the contents of Gitea repositories into bind-mounted container folders on my Portainer servers. This allowed me to set up configurations for Homepage-Docker, Material MkDocs, Traefik Reverse Proxy, and others to pull configuration changes from Gitea directly into the production servers, causing them to hot-load the changes instantly. (within 10 seconds, give or take).
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## Criticisms of Git-Repo-Updater
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When I made the [Git-Repo-Updater docker container stack](https://git.bunny-lab.io/container-registry/git-repo-updater), I ran into the issue of having made something I knew existing solutions existed for but simply did not understand well-enough to use yet. This caused me to basically delegate the GitOps workflow to a bash script with a few environment variables, running inside of an Alpine Linux container. While the container did it's job, it would occassionally have hiccups, caching issues, or repository branch errors that made no sense. This lack of transparency and the need to build an entire VSCode development environment to push new docker package updates to Gitea's [package repository for Git-Repo-Updater](https://git.bunny-lab.io/container-registry/-/packages/container/git-repo-updater/latest) caused a lot of development headaches.
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### Additional Concerns
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In addition to the above, I had security concerns with the method of how I was interacting with the underlying container storage folders. I was running the containers as `privileged: true`, which was not safe nor secure if the container itself was breached (not likely, but you never know). I also didn't like the idea that was using my own CI/CD pipeline for something that I was certain existed elsewhere with much more hardening built-in, and I felt that I was intellectually "*falling-behind*" if I didn't figure out how to use them and migrate away from my Git-Repo-Updater project.
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## Introduction to Gitea Runners
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When I finally got around to figuring out the general architecture of how [Gitea Act "Runners"](https://docs.gitea.com/usage/actions/act-runner) operate, it seemed so much more intuitive than the method I was using in Git-Repo-Updater. The runners can run as a standalone packages, docker containers, or can exist in other forms. The general idea of how the Runners operate (*within my specific GitOps code-to-server use-case*) is as-follows:
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- You spin up a Gitea runner docker container on a server that can access the server files that need to be overwritten/modified
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- The Gitea runner container registers itself to the Gitea server using a registration token generated by a specific Gitea repository
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- The Gitea repository has a Gitea-specific workflows folder that holds `.yaml` files that the runner uses to define tasks that occur when the repository has changes made to it / commits pushed to it.
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- The runner checks out the repository (*clones it to the runner environment*), and leverages rsync to copy the data into the production server's configuration folder(s) based on the unique needs of the task.
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- The runner cleans up after itself and returns back to an "Idle" state.
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- The production server hot-loads the changed configuration files (e.g. Material MkDocs, Traefik, Nginx, etc) and the changes go to into effect immediately
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### Runner Configuration
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I have separated the Docker runner configuration and repository workflow into [Deliver Configuration with a Docker Runner](<../../workflows/Automation/Gitea/Deliver Configuration with a Docker Runner.md>). This preserves the operational example alongside the reasons I chose it. The [Zensical host runner workflow](<../../workflows/Automation/Gitea/Publish Zensical Documentation with a Host Runner.md>) documents the separate host-based implementation.
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### It All Comes Together
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When all of this is set up, it works exactly like Git-Repo-Updater did, but more securely, faster, and more robustly, as the tasks can be changed from the repository-level instead of having to make changes inside of a `Dockerfile` or having to learn how to publish your own Docker containers to a registry. When you learn how to do it, it becomes faster and easier to set up than Git-Repo-Updater as well.
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Then, when you push changes to a repository, the workflow's task triggers automatically, and appears under the "**Actions**" section of Gitea, and copies the repository data to the production server's configuration folder, entirely on its own. The power of runners is only limited by your creativity and can rapidly accelerate not just GitOps workflows, but other more advanced flows (I will research this more in the future).
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Gitea Act Runners are a beautiful thing, and it's a damn shame it took me this long to get around to learning how they work and using them.
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