If you are annoyed by gitlab-runner deprecating run command that I used to run pipelines locally, there is https://github.com/firecow/gitlab-ci-local . But it also opened my eyes to benefita of having runner invariant pipelines -- pipelines written in solution agnostic way. Use bash, make, just, doit or whatever.

Nothing beats having a single script to bootstrap and run the whole pipeline e.g. `make ci`.