gitlab-ci-multirunner Unregister not working

Summary

unregister fails

WARNING: $ sudo gitlab-runner...
ERROR: Deleting runner... forbidden

Steps to reproduce

unregister a runner

$ gitlab-ci-multi-runner stop
$ gitlab-ci-multi-runner unregister --url https://asdf.com/ci --token 43f334f34f34f34f4

Actual behavior

WARNING: Running in user-mode.
WARNING: Use sudo for system-mode:
WARNING: $ sudo gitlab-runner...

ERROR: Deleting runner... forbidden                 runner=95583f44
FATAL: Failed to delete runner

Expected behavior

Successfully deleted! whoot!

Environment description

GitLab Community Edition 8.13.6 69cda01 Self Hosted

Used GitLab Runner version

gitlab-ci-multi-runner --version
Version:      1.10.4
Git revision: b32125f
Git branch:   1-10-stable
GO version:   go1.7.5
Built:        Tue, 31 Jan 2017 14:39:18 +0000
OS/Arch:      darwin/amd64

hint: I see ' sudo gitlab-runner' and the runner is actually 'gitlab-ci-multi-runner' now

there are a lot of places 'gitlab-runner' is still in docs and man pages too, could be good to remove those

This is actually more or less intended as there's an active progress in renaming the entire project to just that, see #1195 (closed)

Yup, as @neico wrote - we plan to rename gitlab-ci-multi-runner to gitlab-runner in entire project. I hoped it'll be done in upcoming 9.0 release, but it'll be probably finished later.

---

As for the initial problem of this issue - @rewbrennon please read carefully documentation of unregister and verify command.

unregister

unregister command, as the name suggests, is used to unregister a Runner from a GitLab installation. The procedure under the hood is following:

• select the Runner (basing on name or URL and token),
• call the unregister API (which needs authorization with the token),
• if all went well - remove the section from config.toml file.

If you remove the Runner from GitLab by its web interface, then after calling the unregister command, GitLab doesn't know anymore such Runner and it doesn't authorize the request, which fails the command. This is made by purpose. We don't want to finish with a success unregister command when no unregister was made. Imagine that someone, by accident, added a character to the token in config.toml file. You're executing unregister, you're seeing Successfully deleted! Whoot! and you think that all is done... while the Runner - unactive forever now - still exists in GitLab.

The purpose of unregister is to unregister and delete - only together.

verify

verify command is used to check if the Runner can still connect with GitLab. The procedure under the hood is following:

• try to connect and authorize to a GitLab installation using URL and token from config.toml file,
• report if operation succeeded or not,
• remove the section from config.toml if operation didn't succeed and the --delete flag was used.

This command is provided for cases when you know that some Runners were removed from your GitLab installations (or whole GitLab installation was deleted) or for cases when you suspect that that could happen. Then you can call gitlab-runner verify and check if any Runner is not connected with any GitLab installation. And - if you don't want to manually edit the config.toml file - you can call gitlab-runner verify --delete to automatically remove unused Runners from configuration.

Summary

So, summarizing. The unregister command is working properly and it does a job for which it was designed. In your case it's not working because you're using the wrong command. You should use gitlab-runner verify [--delete] instead of gitlab-runner unregister.

The one thing that I think we could and should improve is to add a possibility to verify a specific Runner (chosen like in unregister command by name or by URL and token). Currently the verify command is working globally, and if you use gitlab-runner verify --delete it will delete all configuration of all Runners, which were unable to connect to its GitLab installations. This may be a problem in cases when your GitLab installation may be not accessible, so e.g. using this command outside of network where the installation is available, or - like in my case - when my development installation of GitLab is down.

Having the ability to choose a Runner we could use gitlab-runner verify to look for all Runners that are failing verification, and then call gitlab-runner verify --delete --token TOKEN --url URL or gitlab-runner verify --delete --name NAME to remove only specific ones.

I will close this issue and open two new:

• first describing the above idea of adding --token, --URL and --name to the verify command,

• second, to update the logged line in unregister from:

  Deleting runner...

  to

  Unregistering runner from GitLab...

  because this can also be the source of misunderstanding what unregister is doing.

closed

thank you very much @tmaczukin that explains a lot