Is it possible to deploy GItLab Pages without CI/CD?

Question

We have a locally deployed instance of Gitlab, where at the time we cannot afford to have a GitLab Runner to run CI/CD pipelines.

Is it possible to use GitLab Pages without CI/CD? E.g. is it possible to manually prepare the HTML-content, put it in the public folder in the root and make it accessible?

Answer 1

I assume you don't want to use GitLab shared runner which costs you and CI minutes limits.

Public folder

Refer to this gitlab-ci.yaml for making HTML content available https://gitlab.com/pages/plain-html/-/blob/master/.gitlab-ci.yml

Running locally without registration

Here is the known limitations: https://docs.gitlab.com/runner/commands/#limitations-of-gitlab-runner-exec

Pages are directly managed by Gitlab so running locally won't affect the page's state.

Use your own runner and register with gitlab (Possible)

Install GitLab runner on your machine and register as a runner, instructions can be found at Settings->CI/CD->Runners->Specific runner Enable it for your project or group.

I use my personal machine gitlab-runner to execute CI jobs that aren't counted towards CI minutes.