Fixing GitLab Runner's Home Directory on NixOS

If you use gitlab’s shell runner on nixos, you might have noticed, it doesnt set the home directory for the gitlab runner user. This effectively makes the applications believe that / is the home directory. If you use ssh or any similar application, this can quickly become a nightmare.

If you want to debug something as gitlab-runner user, this wouldn’t also work, and error out with account is not available.

Both of these issues can be fixed simply by adding this entry to /etc/passwd

gitlab-runner❌63450:63450:GitLab Runner:/var/lib/gitlab-runner:/bin/bash