Gitlab-annex from ci

Hi,

I have a repo with many binary files stored via git-annex.

I want to define a CI job and for now I’m testing on the public runners provided by gitlab.com.
They have all got a git-annex tag, so supposedly one should somehow be able to also check out the annex’ed content, but I’m not sure how.

It seems that the public runners are always using a docker images by the time I get to script so I git-annex get $files fails as git-annex is not known.

Other than installing git-annex in my image or the script itself (which I’d prefer not to do to save bandwidth), are there any ways to check out also annex’ed content?

Thanks,
Rasmus