Design: Verify onboarding flow should include Runner set-up
🧩 Problem
For self-managed users, setting up a Runner for the project is an essential step in enabling CI pipelines. Currently, we don't surface this as an onboarding step during Verify onboarding in the UI.
As an MVC we proposed to Notify pipeline editor users when Runners need to be set up. It'll allow users with no shared runners to move forward with the necessary steps before they create their configuration.
We should work on an integrated Verify onboarding flow that includes Runner set-up and authoring of the configuration.
💡 Proposal TBD
Some ideas have been discussed in this issue and this Slack thread (internal).
Cross-stage collaboration
Status updates
Oct 28 2021
- Nadia and Gina met to discuss the short-term vs long-term projects we can focus on
Short-term focus
- Our first focus will be solidifying the proposal for displaying an inline alert on the pipeline editor (in the current experience today) when there are no shared runners available #342725. This would only be for self-managed users (not for SaaS).
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✅ Gina's to-do: Follow up with Darren on when the error message is displayed. Are there more cases than just when no shared runners are available?
Also - the error message displayed in the proposal can be generated even if the user has an instance, group or project runner already associated. So something to think about in terms of the flows.
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Long-term focus
- For the long-term proposal, we will schedule this issue for a certain milestone to brainstorm the evolution of how we picture runner set up within the CI/CD onboarding flow.
- Something to consider is how iOS & macOS apps setup can fit into this flow as well. We should wait on problem validation to be carried out in gitlab-runner#27242 (moved) to gather more details, but it would be worth brainstorming if that could fit in with the onboarding flow (as some example of a template .yml file maybe)