My Home Lab Documentation

Documentation for my home lab CI/CD setup

View the Project on GitHub Auzlex/my-home-lab

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LORIC - Orchestrator Node (Gitea)

Purpose

LORIC acts as the dedicated orchestrator node within the home-lab CI/CD infrastructure. It is responsible for polling the Gitea server on CASPER, orchestrating workflow execution, and dispatching jobs to worker nodes like AUREL while maintaining workflow scheduling and coordination. It is also capable of handling building and running docker related tasks however those are offloaded to AUREL.

System Information

Kernel / OS

SSH Stack

Docker

Setup Steps

LORIC was setup using the following steps and instructions:

1. Setup Network Manager CLI for LORIC

We will use the following command to set a static IPv4 on our device and ensure that IPv4 and IPv6 dns are set correctly.

auzlex@LORIC:~ $ sudo nmcli connection modify "target connection" \
    ipv4.addresses 192.168.1.122/24 \
    ipv4.gateway 192.168.1.254 \
    ipv4.dns 192.168.1.125 \
    ipv4.ignore-auto-dns yes \
    ipv4.method manual \
    ipv6.dns 2a00:23c7:593:6501:ba27:ebff:fe0f:e3f2 \
    ipv6.ignore-auto-dns yes \
    ipv6.method auto

We then apply changes by rebooting

auzlex@LORIC:~ $ sudo reboot

verify

auzlex@LORIC:~ $ nmcli

2. Install Docker

auzlex@LORIC:~ $ sudo apt update && sudo apt install -y docker.io docker-compose && sudo systemctl enable docker --now

3. Create Runner Directory

auzlex@LORIC:~ $ mkdir ~/gitea-runner && cd ~/gitea-runner

4. Download Gitea Actions Runner

auzlex@LORIC:~/gitea-runner $ curl -LO https://dl.gitea.com/act_runner/0.2.13/act_runner-0.2.13-linux-arm-7.xz

5. Extract and Prepare Runner

auzlex@LORIC:~/gitea-runner $ unxz act_runner-0.2.13-linux-arm-7.xz
auzlex@LORIC:~/gitea-runner $ mv act_runner-0.2.13-linux-arm-7 act_runner
auzlex@LORIC:~/gitea-runner $ chmod +x act_runner

6. Register Runner with Gitea

auzlex@LORIC:~/gitea-runner $ ./act_runner register --instance http://192.168.1.124:8083 --token <TOKEN> --name loric-runner --labels pi3,armv7 --no-interactive

7. Start Runner (Manual)

auzlex@LORIC:~/gitea-runner $ ./act_runner daemon

8. Make Runner Persistent with systemd

  1. Create service file:

     auzlex@LORIC:~ $ sudo nano /etc/systemd/system/gitea-runner.service

  2. Paste:

     [Unit]
 Description=Gitea Actions Runner
 After=network.target

 [Service]
 Type=simple
 User=auzlex
 WorkingDirectory=/home/auzlex/gitea-runner
 ExecStart=/home/auzlex/gitea-runner/act_runner daemon
 Restart=always

 [Install]
 WantedBy=multi-user.target

  3. Enable and start the service:

     auzlex@LORIC:~ $ sudo systemctl daemon-reload
 auzlex@LORIC:~ $ sudo systemctl enable gitea-runner
 auzlex@LORIC:~ $ sudo systemctl start gitea-runner

  4. Check status:

     auzlex@LORIC:~ $ sudo systemctl status gitea-runner

9. Testing Gitea Runner and worker simple via SSH

We will test running a task on LORIC to echo "Hello from AUREL!"

An SSH has also been setup between AUREL and LORIC so that LORIC can issue commands to the isolated user account called CI, at the moment we can manually configure out Gitea workflow runner to issue commands carefully.

alt text In the example image above, you can see the worker is successfully running my gitea workflow test.yml within my CICD-Test repo. The test.yml is to instruct commands under the ssh.

name: Test Worker Connectivity

on:
  push:
    branches:
      - main

jobs:
  ping-worker:
    runs-on: pi3  # label matches LORIC and AUREL worker
    steps:
      - name: Echo from Worker
        run: ssh ci@192.168.1.123 'echo "Hello from AUREL!"'

10. Setting Up Docker Context

These commands will setup docker context for LORIC. LORIC also has docker installed and running which can perform builds and other tasks, however their role is to simply only handle requests from CASPER and tell other devices within my setup to do more of the heavy lifting.

When a workflow runs:

  1. CASPER has a job that LORIC runs.
  2. LORIC prepares workflow.
  3. Docker commands execute using active context.
  4. Workloads run locally or remotely.
  5. Containers clean up normally after job.

If the runner is busy:

We use this command below to ensure what types of context is available.

docker context ls

NAME      DESCRIPTION                               DOCKER ENDPOINT               ERROR
aurel *                                             ssh://ci@192.168.1.123        
default   Current DOCKER_HOST based configuration   unix:///var/run/docker.sock

Docker contexts can be created with the following command:

docker context create aurel \
  --docker "host=ssh://ci@192.168.1.123"

Next we tell LORIC to use AUREL for docker usage.

docker context use aurel

After this:

Notes