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BookStack on GKE Autopilot — 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 GKE module on Google Cloud (GKE Autopilot): 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 GKE 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, GKE Autopilot cluster, 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
export NAMESPACE="<bookstack-namespace>"   # the module's Kubernetes namespace (from Task 1)

Fetch cluster credentials so kubectl targets the Autopilot cluster:

CLUSTER=$(gcloud container clusters list --project="$PROJECT" --format="value(name)" --limit=1)
gcloud container clusters get-credentials "$CLUSTER" --region="$REGION" --project="$PROJECT"

Task 1 — Deploy the module [Automated]​

  1. In the RAD platform, open BookStack (GKE), 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 GKE Autopilot workload (Deployment) and a LoadBalancer Service with a reserved static IP, 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. On GKE the database is reached through a Cloud SQL Auth Proxy sidecar on 127.0.0.1:3306. 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):

    kubectl get pods,svc -n "$NAMESPACE"
    SERVICE_IP=$(kubectl get svc -n "$NAMESPACE" \
      -o jsonpath='{.items[?(@.spec.type=="LoadBalancer")].status.loadBalancer.ingress[0].ip}')
    echo "External IP: $SERVICE_IP"
    export SERVICE_URL="http://$SERVICE_IP"

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 (the LoadBalancer external IP from Task 1). 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 workload and its pods (each deploy rolls out a new pod template; the Deployment shifts traffic to healthy pods):

    kubectl get deployment,pods -n "$NAMESPACE"
    kubectl describe deployment -n "$NAMESPACE"

  2. Scale by changing the min/max instance inputs and clicking Update on the deployment details page — the module owns the workload spec, so scaling is a configuration change, not a manual kubectl scale edit (a manual edit would be reverted on the next apply). BookStack on GKE defaults to min_instance_count = 1 and max_instance_count = 1; GKE has no scale-to-zero, so at least one replica always runs. Because uploads live on a shared NFS volume, the module deploys with the Recreate strategy and a single pod — do not scale beyond one replica without enabling Redis (enable_redis = true) for shared cache and sessions. A PodDisruptionBudget guards the workload against involuntary eviction during node maintenance.

  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 pod (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="$PROJECT" --filter="name~bookstack"
    kubectl get jobs -n "$NAMESPACE"   # 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:

    kubectl logs -n "$NAMESPACE" -l app --tail=50
    gcloud logging read \
      'resource.type="k8s_container" AND resource.labels.namespace_name="'"$NAMESPACE"'"' \
      --project="$PROJECT" --limit=50

    Logs Explorer filter: resource.type="k8s_container" AND resource.labels.namespace_name="<namespace>".

  2. Monitoring — open the GKE / Kubernetes dashboards for the workload and review request throughput, latency, pod count and restarts, and CPU / memory utilisation. The module also provisions an uptime check against the LoadBalancer endpoint; 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.

  • Pod unhealthy / service won't serve: inspect the pod 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. 
    kubectl get pods,svc,hpa,pdb -n "$NAMESPACE"
    kubectl describe pod -n "$NAMESPACE"
    kubectl logs -n "$NAMESPACE" -l app --tail=100
  • Database connection errors: confirm the Cloud SQL instance is RUNNABLE, the DB_PASSWORD secret exists, the Cloud SQL Auth Proxy sidecar is running on 127.0.0.1:3306, and the db-init job completed successfully. BookStack connects using the Laravel-native DB_USERNAME / DB_PASSWORD / DB_DATABASE env vars.
  • Initialisation job failed: inspect the db-init job and read the failed pod's logs: 
    kubectl get jobs -n "$NAMESPACE"
    kubectl logs -n "$NAMESPACE" job/<db-init-job-name>
  • Image mirroring / pull errors: confirm the linuxserver/bookstack image was mirrored into Artifact Registry and the pulled tag exists (kubectl describe pod surfaces ImagePullBackOff).
  • 403 / permission errors: verify the workload's Workload Identity service account and its 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). Note that the GKE variant's shipped liveness_probe default path is a stale WordPress leftover (/wp-admin/install.php); the correct BookStack health path is /status — set it explicitly if the default has not been corrected in your deployment.

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 GKE workload and its namespace, the LoadBalancer and reserved static IP, the 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, GKE cluster, registry) are managed separately and are not removed here.

Summary​

TaskTypeOutcome
1 — DeployAutomatedModule provisions the GKE workload, LoadBalancer, 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 pods, scale, update version, manage secrets/backups, DB access
4 — ObserveManualQuery Cloud Logging; review Cloud Monitoring metrics and uptime check
5 — TroubleshootManualDiagnose pod, 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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