pywinauto/GUI automation cannot start with gitlab runner

Hi Everyone,

I am pretty new into gitlab world and decided to give it a try. I want to run pywinauto with gitlab runner, but everytime I try to run a healthy pywinauto script gitlab throws the following error:
pywinauto_utilities.py", line 39, in force_WindowIdentify
active_only=active, visible_only=visible)
File “C:\Python27\lib\site-packages\pywinauto-0.6.7-py2.7.egg\pywinauto\findwindows.py”, line 113, in find_window
element = find_element(**kwargs)
File “C:\Python27\lib\site-packages\pywinauto-0.6.7-py2.7.egg\pywinauto\findwindows.py”, line 84, in find_element
elements = find_elements(**kwargs)
File “C:\Python27\lib\site-packages\pywinauto-0.6.7-py2.7.egg\pywinauto\findwindows.py”, line 243, in find_elements
raise ctypes.WinError()

This only happens with gitlab, if I make use of teamcity or locally, the script runs fine.

I cannot see the process being triggered, I think that is the main idea why pywinauto fails to detect it.

Hi Jose,
Did you ever find a solution to this issue? We run gitlab-runner in a cmd prompt instead of as a service to deal with this, but I would much rather have a service based solution.
If you have successfully found a good solution, please share.
Thanks!

sr-qa-auto, what do you mean by “run gitlab-runner in a cmd prompt”? Can you give an example?