Use different operating systems in GitLab CI pipeline for a given job

Question

I have a GitLab CI pipeline that uses by default, in all stages, the Temurin Docker (Linux) image for Java.

I need to expand the build targets to use several operating systems: Linux, macOS, Windows. So if there were the following Docker images: eclipse-temurin:21-jdk-jammy, eclipse-temurin:21-jdk-nanoserver, and eclipse-temurin:21-jdk-macos, is there a way to run a given job against all those Docker images, without repeating the job definitions?

The initial route I'm taking is to use GitLab CI's matrix but it's not quite working:

assemble:
  image: eclipse-temurin:21-jdk-${OS}
  parallel:
    matrix:
      - OS: [jammy, nanoserver]
  script:
    - ./gradlew packageDistributionForCurrentOS
  stage: assemble

I see the Docker images are resolved correctly, but somehow the GitLab runner fails for eclipse-temurin:21-jdk-nanoserver:

Running with gitlab-runner 16.6.0~beta.105.gd2263193 (d2263193)
  on blue-5.saas-linux-small-amd64.runners-manager.gitlab.com/default -AzERasQ, system ID: s_4cb09cee29e2
  feature flags: FF_USE_IMPROVED_URL_MASKING:true
Preparing the "docker+machine" executor 00:05
Using Docker executor with image eclipse-temurin:21-jdk-nanoserver ...
Pulling docker image eclipse-temurin:21-jdk-nanoserver ...
WARNING: Failed to pull image with policy "always": no matching manifest for linux/amd64 in the manifest list entries (manager.go:237:0s)
ERROR: Job failed: failed to pull image "eclipse-temurin:21-jdk-nanoserver" with specified policies [always]: no matching manifest for linux/amd64 in the manifest list entries (manager.go:237:0s)

This error doesn't tell me much. I can only infer that the Docker image eclipse-temurin:21-jdk-nanoserver is not available for the linux/amd64 architecture, and that may be what the GitLab runner's host machine is actually mounted on, but these Docker images should be agnostic to the infrastructure, and 21-jdk-nanoserver is indeed a Windows image.

Any suggestions on how to move forward with this approach to achieve this desired behavior?

Answer 1

The issue here is your GitLab runner looks to have an architecture of linux/amd64 but your trying to pull the docker tag 21-jdk-nanoserver which is only built for windows architectures. So you cannot run this tag version of the image on Linux.

So either change to use a tag that's built for the Linux architecture of your GitLab runner, or update your runner tags to be able to run this image on a windows runner.

---

Expanding on Doyle's answer a little bit more — the final solution could look like:

assemble:
  artifacts:
    paths:
      - $CI_PROJECT_DIR/build/libs/
  image: eclipse-temurin:21-jdk-$OS
  parallel:
    matrix:
      - PLATFORM: linux
        OS: jammy
        RUNNER: saas-linux-medium-amd64
      - PLATFORM: windows
        OS: nanoserver
        RUNNER: saas-windows-medium-amd64
  script:
    - ./gradlew packageDistributionForCurrentOS $GRADLE_EXTRA_OPTS
  stage: assemble
  tags:
    - $RUNNER

This run fine in both Linux and Windows.

Running with gitlab-runner 16.5.0 (853330f9)
  on gitlab-com-saas-windows-medium-amd64 ..., system ID: ...
Preparing the "custom" executor 04:42
Using Custom executor with driver autoscaler 0.1.3 (4f53eb0)...
Creating virtual machine for the job...
Virtual machine created!
...
$ ./gradlew packageDistributionForCurrentOS
Daemon will be stopped at the end of the build 
> Configure project :
Kotlin DSL property assignment is an incubating feature.
> Task :checkRuntime
> Task :checkKotlinGradlePluginConfigurationErrors
> Task :processResources
> Task :compileKotlin
> Task :createRuntimeImage
> Task :compileJava NO-SOURCE
> Task :classes
> Task :jar
> Task :prepareAppResources NO-SOURCE
> Task :unpackDefaultComposeDesktopJvmApplicationResources
> Task :downloadWix
Download https://github.com/wixtoolset/wix3/releases/download/wix3112rtm/wix311-binaries.zip
> Task :unzipWix
> Task :packageMsi
...
> Task :packageDistributionForCurrentOS
BUILD SUCCESSFUL in 6m 41s
10 actionable tasks: 10 executed
...
Job succeeded