I have a PHP/Laravel project on a gitlab reo. Recently I’ve added CI/CD for it using the following .gitlab-ci.yml file file:

stages:
  - pull
  - optimize

variables:
  GIT_SSL_NO_VERIFY: "1"

before_script:
  - git config --global http.sslVerify false
  - git config --global credential.helper store
  - echo "https://${CI_REPOSITORY_USER}:${CI_REPOSITORY_PASSWORD}@gitlab.com" > ~/.git-credentials

pull_job:
  stage: pull
  script:
    - echo "Pulling the project on the server through git"
    - git pull origin master
  only:
    - master

optimize_job:
  stage: optimize
  script:
    - echo "Clearing the cache by optimize command.."
    - php artisan optimize

As you can see, there are two stages, the first is pull stage which passes as well, and optimize stage which fails. The error is:

.gitlab-ci.yml returns /usr/bin/bash: line 156: php: command not found error

Base on some research, I’ve added php tag for that stage like this:

optimize_job:
  stage: optimize
  script:
    - echo "Clearing the cache by optimize command.."
    - php artisan optimize
  tags:
    - php

Which cases the pipline to stuck and goes to pending status by throwing this error:

This job is stuck because of one of the following problems. There are no active runners online, no runners for the protected branch, or no runners that match all of the job’s tags:
php

Go to project CI settings

Any idea what should I do?