Title: GitLab Runner Project and Runner Registration with Tokens

I’m working on setting up GitLab Runners on multiple EC2 instances and I’m confused about how to map runners to projects and manage registration tokens. Here’s my scenario:

• I have several GitLab projects (p1, p2, p3, and so on).
• I want to use the same group of runners (r1, r2, r3) for multiple projects.
• Each EC2 instance is running a GitLab Runner.

I understand for each project I can generate gitlab runner registration token which when I run on any single ec2 it gets registered as runner.

The issue I’m facing is that when I run the registration command on different EC2 instances with the same token, only one runner shows up in GitLab.

Does one token can be used for only 1 runner/ec2 ? Do I need to generate separate tokens for each runner ?

I would like to understand the correct way to set up registration tokens, so I can have the same runners associated with multiple projects. How should I structure my registration tokens and runner setup to achieve this?

Any guidance or best practices for managing GitLab Runner registration and mapping to projects in this scenario would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you for your help!

The issue I’m facing is that when I run the registration command on different EC2 instances with the same token, only one runner shows up in GitLab project.

Runner can be set on instance (only self-hosted gitlab), group or project.

The usual setup is to set Runner on a Group so all projects in that group have access to it.

You can use the same registration token on multiple EC2 instances. They will represent a single runner and job will be randomly picked up by each “instance” of runner.

For understanding how Runners work I suggest to read