Currently there is no way to run the gitlab as a whole with just docker compose. I see that the gitlab and gitlab runner needs to be initialised separately and one needs to contact each other. This can still be solved using docker compose. * Create 2 containers - gitlab, gitlab-runner using docker compose file. * Let both containers come up * The gitlab-runner can wait until the token generated is available in a file - User would go in and get the token from gitlab web - User would execute a command in second container like docker exec -it ea1231df save-token <token-from-ui> * This will cause the second container to continue I dont see any way to save the tags and others to a file and load it in container. Anything that is available as checkboxes ideally(atleast critical ones) should be configurable in a file. Only this way we can make everything declarative