Gitlab 17.x upgrade

Gitlab is migrating to a new runner registration workflow utilizing runner authentication tokens. Currently, these can be generated via the Admin Area UI following these steps, or programatically via the REST API available on gitlab. Note that programatically requires an existing administrator level access token. The secret used by gitlab-runner must be modified so that the new runner authentication token generated from above is available. See below examples, where REDACTED in the new workflow would be the newly generated authentication token.

In the legacy runner registration workflow, fields were specified with:

apiVersion: v1
kind: Secret
metadata:
  name: gitlab-gitlab-runner-secret
type: Opaque
data:
  runner-registration-token: "REDACTED" # DEPRECATED, set to ""
  runner-token: ""

In the new runner registration workflow, you must use runner-token instead:

apiVersion: v1
kind: Secret
metadata:
  name: gitlab-gitlab-runner-secret
type: Opaque
data:
  runner-registration-token: "" # need to leave as an empty string for compatibility reasons
  runner-token: "REDACTED"

Re-enable legacy workflow

The alternative is to manually re-enable the legacy workflow, which should be available until the next major release of Gitlab 18.0. This is accomplished following these steps in the Admin Area UI.