Gitlab runner status show "the service is not installed" but it was installed and run successfully

Question

I installed Gitlab-runner in WSL Ubuntu 20. Firstly, I have registered runner and ran successfully. But when I check the status of Gitlab-runner it show:

namlb@Admin:/etc/init.d$ sudo gitlab-runner status
Runtime platform                                    arch=amd64 os=linux pid=2170 revision=e0218c92
version=14.3.2
gitlab-runner: the service is not installed

And another thing that confused me is that my runner just execute job when I already run gitlab-runner run command, whilst in some guides they just need run gitlab-runner start and job will be execute when triggered.

Here is some info about my gitlab-runner:

namlb@Admin:~$ sudo gitlab-runner start
[sudo] password for namlb:
Runtime platform                                    arch=amd64 os=linux pid=2563 revision=e0218c92 version=14.3.2
namlb@Admin:~$ gitlab-runner status
Runtime platform                                    arch=amd64 os=linux pid=2609 revision=e0218c92 version=14.3.2
FATAL: The --user is not supported for non-root users
namlb@Admin:~$ sudo gitlab-runner status
Runtime platform                                    arch=amd64 os=linux pid=2635 revision=e0218c92 version=14.3.2
gitlab-runner: the service is not installed
namlb@Admin:~$ gitlab-runner verify
Runtime platform                                    arch=amd64 os=linux pid=2686 revision=e0218c92 version=14.3.2
WARNING: Running in user-mode.
WARNING: The user-mode requires you to manually start builds processing:
WARNING: $ gitlab-runner run
WARNING: Use sudo for system-mode:
WARNING: $ sudo gitlab-runner...

Verifying runner... is alive                        runner=22WNSZ6v

Commix

Answer 1

Run "service gitlab-runner status" for more information.

When I got the message "gitlab-runner: the service is not installed" I realized that the file /usr/lib/gitlab-runner/gitlab-runner had incorrect permissions.

Philipps

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Answer 2

for Ubuntu

Change your /etc/init.d/gitlab-runner

...
DAEMON="/usr/bin/gitlab-runner"
DESC="GitLab Runner"
USER="gitlab-runner"
...
--exec "$DAEMON" --  "run" "--working-directory" "/var/lib/gitlab-runner" "--config" "/etc/gitlab-runner/config.toml" "--service" "gitlab-runner" "--syslog" "--user" "$USER"
...

Variable $DAEMON not defined and is used

  status)
    status_of_proc -p "$PIDFILE" "$DAEMON" "$DESC"
    ;;
  *)

Discontinuance