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BookStack on Cloud Run — Lab Guide

📖 Configuration Guide

Overview​

Estimated time: 45–90 minutes

BookStack is a free, open-source wiki and documentation platform for organising knowledge into a simple shelves → books → chapters → pages hierarchy. It is built on Laravel (PHP) and backed by MySQL. This lab takes you through the full operational lifecycle of the BookStack on Cloud Run module on Google Cloud: deploy it, access and verify it, run it day-to-day, observe it, diagnose common problems, and tear it down.

The lab focuses on operating the Cloud Run module and the Google Cloud platform, not on BookStack product features. For the complete list of provisioned services and every configuration input (organised by group), see the Configuration Guide — this lab deliberately does not duplicate that detail so it stays accurate over time.

Objectives​

By the end of this lab you will be able to:

  • Deploy the module from the RAD platform and locate the resources it provisions.
  • Access and verify the running service.
  • Perform day-2 operations — inspect, scale, update, and manage secrets and backups.
  • Observe the service with Cloud Logging and Cloud Monitoring.
  • Diagnose and resolve the most common deployment and runtime issues.
  • Tear the deployment down cleanly.

Prerequisites​

  • Services_GCP deployed in the target project (provides the VPC, Cloud SQL, Artifact Registry, and shared service accounts this module depends on).
  • A Google Cloud project with billing enabled.
  • gcloud CLI authenticated: gcloud auth login and gcloud auth application-default login.
  • Project Owner (or equivalent) IAM on the project.
  • RAD platform access with permission to deploy modules into the project.

Set these shell variables once; every task below reuses them:

export PROJECT="<your-gcp-project-id>"
export REGION="us-central1"          # the region you deploy into

Task 1 — Deploy the module [Automated]​

  1. In the RAD platform, open BookStack (Cloud Run), set project_id, and review the inputs. Configure only what you need — the Configuration Guide documents every input by group, with defaults. Review the estimated cost (if credits are enabled) and click Deploy, which opens the deployment status page with real-time logs.

  2. The platform provisions the Cloud Run service, a Cloud SQL (MySQL 8.0) database with its Secret Manager secrets (the Laravel APP_KEY and the database password), a Cloud Storage bookstack-uploads bucket, an NFS volume mounted at /var/lib/bookstack for uploaded images and attachments, mirrors the prebuilt linuxserver/bookstack image into Artifact Registry, and runs a one-shot database-initialisation (db-init) job that creates the database, application user, and grants. BookStack's LinuxServer image then runs php artisan migrate automatically on first boot, so the schema is created on start (there is no separate migrate job). First deploys take roughly 20–35 minutes (Cloud SQL creation dominates).

  3. When it completes, discover the resources with name-agnostic filters (so the commands keep working regardless of the deployment suffix):

    SERVICE=$(gcloud run services list --project="$PROJECT" --region="$REGION" \
      --filter="metadata.name~bookstack" --format="value(metadata.name)" --limit=1)
    SERVICE_URL=$(gcloud run services describe "$SERVICE" \
      --project="$PROJECT" --region="$REGION" --format="value(status.url)")
    echo "Service: $SERVICE"
    echo "URL:     $SERVICE_URL"

Task 2 — Access & verify [Manual]​

  1. Confirm the service is healthy and connected to its database. BookStack exposes an unauthenticated JSON health endpoint that reports application, database, cache, and session status:

    curl -s "$SERVICE_URL/status"   # expect a JSON object with status fields

  2. Open $SERVICE_URL in a browser. BookStack ships with a default first-run administrator: admin@admin.com / password. Sign in, then immediately change the password and the admin email address under Settings → Users. Once you are in, organise your content using BookStack's hierarchy — shelves hold books, books hold chapters, and chapters hold pages.

Task 3 — Operate & keep it running (Day-2) [Manual]​

  1. Inspect the service and its revisions (each deploy creates an immutable revision; traffic shifts to the newest healthy one):

    gcloud run services describe "$SERVICE" --project="$PROJECT" --region="$REGION"
    gcloud run revisions list --service="$SERVICE" --project="$PROJECT" --region="$REGION"

  2. Scale by changing the min/max instance inputs and clicking Update on the deployment details page — the module owns the service spec, so scaling is a configuration change, not a manual gcloud edit (a manual edit would be reverted on the next apply). BookStack defaults to min_instance_count = 0 (scale-to-zero) and max_instance_count = 1. Because BookStack stores uploads on an NFS-backed filesystem and keeps sessions per-instance, do not scale beyond one instance without enabling Redis (enable_redis = true) for shared cache and sessions.

  3. Update the application version by changing the version input in the RAD platform and applying it via Update. BookStack uses the prebuilt linuxserver/bookstack image, so a version bump re-pulls the mirrored image tag and rolls out a new revision (no custom build runs). Pin a specific tag (e.g. version-v24.10) in production rather than the default latest.

  4. Manage secrets and backups:

    gcloud secrets list --project="$PROJECT" --filter="name~bookstack"
    gcloud run jobs list --project="$PROJECT" --region="$REGION"   # db-init job

  5. Open a database session for inspection or maintenance:

    INSTANCE=$(gcloud sql instances list --project="$PROJECT" --format="value(name)" --limit=1)
    gcloud sql connect "$INSTANCE" --user=bookstack --project="$PROJECT"

Task 4 — Observe: Logging & Monitoring [Manual]​

  1. Logs — from the CLI or the Logs Explorer:

    gcloud run services logs read "$SERVICE" --project="$PROJECT" --region="$REGION" --limit=50

    Logs Explorer filter: resource.type="cloud_run_revision" AND resource.labels.service_name="<service>".

  2. Monitoring — open the Cloud Run dashboard for the service and review request count, request latency (P50/P95/P99), instance count (scaling behaviour), and CPU / memory utilisation. The module also provisions an uptime check; confirm it is green under Monitoring → Uptime checks, and review Alerting → Policies.

Task 5 — Troubleshoot & debug [Manual]​

Durable techniques for the failure modes you are most likely to hit. These are platform-level diagnostics and do not change with BookStack releases.

  • Revision unhealthy / service won't serve: inspect the latest revision and its logs for startup errors, and confirm env vars and secrets resolved. The liveness probe targets /status with a generous first-boot window (300s initial delay) so the image's automatic php artisan migrate can finish before the probe fails. 
    gcloud run revisions list --service="$SERVICE" --project="$PROJECT" --region="$REGION"
    gcloud run services logs read "$SERVICE" --project="$PROJECT" --region="$REGION" --limit=100
  • Database connection errors: confirm the Cloud SQL instance is RUNNABLE, the DB_PASSWORD secret exists, and the db-init job completed successfully. BookStack connects over the Cloud SQL private IP (TCP) using the Laravel-native DB_USERNAME / DB_PASSWORD / DB_DATABASE env vars.
  • Initialisation job failed: list executions and read the failed one's logs: 
    gcloud run jobs executions list --job="${SERVICE}-db-init" \
      --project="$PROJECT" --region="$REGION"
  • Image mirroring / pull errors: confirm the linuxserver/bookstack image was mirrored into Artifact Registry and the pulled tag exists.
  • 403 / permission errors: verify the runtime service account's IAM roles.

See the Configuration Guide's Configuration Pitfalls section for setting-specific gotchas (including the critical rule never to rotate APP_KEY after first boot — doing so makes all previously encrypted database values undecryptable).

Task 6 — Tear down [Automated]​

On the Deployments page, open the deployment and click the Trash icon (Delete). Delete runs terraform destroy and is irreversible (the deployment record is retained for history). If a deployment is stuck and the RAD platform can no longer manage it (for example after manual changes that conflict with the Terraform state), use Purge instead — it removes the deployment from RAD's records without destroying the cloud resources (it makes RAD forget the project). This removes everything the module created — the Cloud Run service, Cloud SQL database, Secret Manager secrets (including APP_KEY), GCS buckets, and Artifact Registry images. Resources owned by Services_GCP (the VPC, shared Cloud SQL, registry) are managed separately and are not removed here.

Summary​

TaskTypeOutcome
1 — DeployAutomatedModule provisions Cloud Run, Cloud SQL (MySQL 8.0), secrets, bookstack-uploads bucket, NFS, and runs DB init
2 — Access & verifyManualHealth check passes; sign in and change the default admin credentials
3 — OperateManualInspect revisions, scale, update version, manage secrets/backups, DB access
4 — ObserveManualQuery Cloud Logging; review Cloud Monitoring metrics and uptime check
5 — TroubleshootManualDiagnose revision, database, init-job, image, and IAM issues
6 — Tear downAutomatedDelete (Trash) removes all module resources

By · Google Cloud certified: ACE · PCA · PCD · PDE · PSE · CDL

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