Troubleshooting GitLab Runner Helm chart

Error: Job failed (system failure): secrets is forbidden

If you see the following error, enable RBAC support to correct it: 

Using Kubernetes executor with image alpine ...
ERROR: Job failed (system failure): secrets is forbidden: User "system:serviceaccount:gitlab:default"
cannot create resource "secrets" in API group "" in the namespace "gitlab"

Error: Unable to mount volumes for pod

If you see mount volume failures for a required secret, ensure that you have stored registration tokens or runner tokens in secrets.

Slow artifact uploads to Google Cloud Storage

Artifact uploads to Google Cloud Storage can experience reduced performance (a slower bandwidth rate) due to the runner helper pod becoming CPU bound. To mitigate this problem, increase the Helper pod CPU Limit: 

runners:
  config: |
    [[runners]]
      [runners.kubernetes]
        helper_cpu_limit = "250m"

For more information, see issue 28393.

PANIC: creating directory: mkdir /nonexistent: permission denied

To resolve this error, switch to the Ubuntu-based GitLab Runner Docker image.

Error: invalid header field for "Private-Token"

You might see this error if the runner-token value in gitlab-runner-secret is base64-encoded with a newline character (\n) at the end: 

couldn't execute POST against "https:/gitlab.example.com/api/v4/runners/verify":
net/http: invalid header field for "Private-Token"

To resolve this issue, ensure a newline (\n) is not appended to the token value. For example: echo -n glrt-A5sFGybkt0pY8AdVLnx4 | base64.

FATAL: Runner configuration is reserved

You might get the following error in the pod logs after installing the GitLab Runner Helm chart: 

FATAL: Runner configuration other than name and executor configuration is reserved
(specifically --locked, --access-level, --run-untagged, --maximum-timeout, --paused, --tag-list, and --maintenance-note)
and cannot be specified when registering with a runner authentication token. This configuration is specified
on the GitLab server. Please try again without specifying any of those arguments

This error happens when you use an authentication token, and provide a token through a secret. To fix it, review your values YAML file and make sure that you are not using any deprecated values. For more information about which values are deprecated, see Installing GitLab Runner with Helm chart.