A gateway between Gitlab CI and DIRAC

GitLab’s Continuous Integration has proven to be an efficient tool to manage the lifecycle of experimental software. This has sparked interest in uses that exceed simple unit tests, and therefore require more resources, such as production data configuration and physics data analysis. The default GitLab CI runner software is not appropriate for such tasks, and we show that it is possible to use the GitLab API and modern container orchestration technologies to build a custom CI runner that integrates with DIRAC, the middleware used by the LHCb experiment to run its job on the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid. This system allows for excellent utilisation of computing resources while also providing additional flexibility for defining jobs and providing authentication.