Is the only way to run self hosted ruuners for bitbucket pipelines with docker?

[kalib]

In all the documentation pages that I see for how to run bitbucket pipelines self-hosted runners, it always gives the docker command to run your runner. Is that the only way?

Is it possible to also run it on a regular VM or EC2 instance for example, without running docker inside that VM? My concern is with the docker-on-docker situation, since I run builds of docker images, etc...

Thanks.

[Mark C · Accepted solution]

Hi @kalib

Thank you for reaching out to the community.

I'm afraid installing Docker is part of the requirements when using Bitbucket Cloud Runners.
For that, you can't use Runners in an environment (VM, EC2, or local machine) without Docker installed.
This is because you'll need to run a docker container run command to start a Runner and it will be run in a Docker daemon.

Do let me know if you have further questions.

Regards,
Mark C

[kristoffer]

From what I can see the Windows version of the self-hosted runner does not involve Docker at all. Rather it seems to be some sort of Java application.