Synology NAS hosted CI/CD for GPU runners

TLDR; Gitea was a good choice for me, maybe it would be for you too.

The requirements

My overall goal was to run CI/CD workflows that require GPUs. I wanted to run workflows on both public mirrored AND privately hosted repositories and I wanted to exercise my new Homelab setup. For these reasons, I could not just install GitHub runner on a GPU machine. I also avoided Docker compose as I wanted a more hands-on experience to learn about container networking and orchestration.

The hardware:

  1. A Synology NAS, which will serve as host for the Gitea instance

  2. A workstation with an NVIDIA RTX 4000 series GPU, which will serve as a CI/CD runner

I needed to choose a git platform implementation. There are really only three self-hosting solutions that have CI/CD capability: Gitlab CE, Gitea, and Gogs. I learned that only Gitea has repository mirroring for free.

The plan

  1. Install Gitea on the NAS

    My starting point was this Gist. Except that there's no reason to use that super out-of-date postgres container. The official postgres/postgres container works just fine. When you do this, you (may) need to set the following additional environment variables:

    PGDATA = /var/lib/postgresql/data
POSTGRES_USER = gitea_user
POSTGRES_PASSWORD = gitea_pass
POSTGRES_DB = gitea

  2. Complete the browser-based Gitea install from the workstation

    Hitting the ip address of your NAS with the HTTP_PORT specified in Step 1

  3. Setup the Gitea runner on the workstation

    # see: https://gitea.com/gitea/act_runner/src/branch/main/examples/docker
# where:
#   HTTPS_PORT is set in Step 1 above
#   GITEA_RUNNER_REGISTRATION_TOKEN is obtained from the "Create new Runner" settings dialog
docker run -e GITEA_INSTANCE_URL=http://$NAS_URL:$HTTPS_PORT -e GITEA_RUNNER_REGISTRATION_TOKEN=$GITEA_RUNNER_REGISTRATION_TOKEN -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock -v $PWD/data:/data --name my_runner gitea/act_runner:nightly

Usage

A. Setup a repository mirror from Github, launch your Docker container from Step 3, .github/workflows will just run!

B. Write a file to your private Gitea repo at .gitea/workflows/$name.yml, import from Github actions at will.