Certification track: Associate Cloud Engineer (ACE)
CalDiy on Cloud Run — Lab Guide
Overview
Estimated time: 45–90 minutes
Cal.diy is the MIT-licensed, self-hostable fork of Cal.com — an open-source scheduling platform that eliminates the back-and-forth of meeting coordination. This lab takes you through the full operational lifecycle of the Cal.diy 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 Cal.diy 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 loginandgcloud 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]
-
Click Deploy in the RAD platform top navigation, open Cal.diy (Cloud Run) from the Platform Modules list to start configuration, 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. -
The platform provisions the Cloud Run service, a Cloud SQL (PostgreSQL) database with its Secret Manager secrets (
NEXTAUTH_SECRETandCALENDSO_ENCRYPTION_KEY), builds the custom wrapper container image, and runs three one-shot database-initialisation jobs (db-init,db-migrate,seed-app-store). First deploys take roughly 20–35 minutes (Cloud SQL creation and image build dominate). -
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="$REGION" \
--filter="metadata.name~cal" --format="value(metadata.name)" --limit=1)
SERVICE_URL=$(gcloud run services describe "$SERVICE" \
--project="$PROJECT" --region="$REGION" --format="value(status.url)")
echo "Service: $SERVICE"
echo "URL: $SERVICE_URL"
Task 2 — Access & verify [Manual]
-
Confirm the service is healthy and its NextAuth session layer is ready:
curl -s -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code}\n" "$SERVICE_URL/api/auth/session"
# expect 200Note on first boot: Cal.diy runs a URL-rewrite step and Prisma migrations before it can serve requests. The startup probe allows up to 6 minutes. If you see a non-200 response, wait 2–3 minutes and retry.
-
Open
$SERVICE_URLin a browser. Cal.diy presents an account-creation form on first visit — create your admin account there. There is no pre-provisioned admin password secret; the account credentials are set by the first user who signs up. -
Confirm the app-specific secrets were created automatically:
gcloud secrets list --project="$PROJECT" --filter="name~cal" \
--format="table(name,createTime)"You should see secrets matching
*-nextauth-secretand*-encryption-key.
Task 3 — Operate & keep it running (Day-2) [Manual]
-
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" -
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
gcloudedit (a manual edit would be reverted on the next apply). -
Update the application version by changing the version input via Update on the deployment details page; a new image builds and a new revision rolls out.
-
Manage secrets and backups:
gcloud secrets list --project="$PROJECT" --filter="name~cal"
gcloud run jobs list --project="$PROJECT" --region="$REGION" # init + backup jobs -
Open a database session for inspection or maintenance:
INSTANCE=$(gcloud sql instances list --project="$PROJECT" \
--format="value(name)" --limit=1)
gcloud sql connect "$INSTANCE" --user=calcom --project="$PROJECT"
Task 4 — Observe: Logging & Monitoring [Manual]
-
Logs — from the CLI or the Logs Explorer:
gcloud run services logs read "$SERVICE" --project="$PROJECT" --region="$REGION" --limit=50Logs Explorer filter:
resource.type="cloud_run_revision" AND resource.labels.service_name="<service>". -
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 Cal.diy releases.
- Revision unhealthy / service won't serve: inspect the latest revision and its
logs for startup errors, and confirm env vars and secrets resolved.
gcloud run revisions list --service="$SERVICE" --project="$PROJECT" --region="$REGION"
gcloud run services logs read "$SERVICE" --project="$PROJECT" --region="$REGION" --limit=100 - Startup loop / 503 on
/api/auth/session: Cal.diy runs a URL-rewrite pass, Prisma migrations, and an app-store seed before it can serve requests. The startup probe allows 6 minutes; if the instance is killed before that window, check thatstartup_probe.failure_thresholdhas not been reduced below the default. Also confirmmemory_limitis at least2Gi— OOM kills before the app is ready. - Database connection errors: confirm the Cloud SQL instance is
RUNNABLE, the DB password secret exists, and all three initialisation jobs completed successfully. - Initialisation jobs failed: list executions and read the failed one's logs:
gcloud run jobs list --project="$PROJECT" --region="$REGION" --filter="name~cal"
gcloud run jobs executions list --job="${SERVICE}-db-init" \
--project="$PROJECT" --region="$REGION"
gcloud run jobs executions list --job="${SERVICE}-db-migrate" \
--project="$PROJECT" --region="$REGION" - Image build failed: review Cloud Build history for the failed build's log.
- 403 / permission errors: verify the runtime service account's IAM roles.
See the Configuration Guide's Configuration Pitfalls section for setting-specific gotchas.
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, 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
| Task | Type | Outcome |
|---|---|---|
| 1 — Deploy | Automated | Module provisions Cloud Run, Cloud SQL, secrets, and runs DB init/migrate/seed |
| 2 — Access & verify | Manual | Health check passes; first-visit account creation; secrets confirmed |
| 3 — Operate | Manual | Inspect revisions, scale, update version, manage secrets/backups, DB access |
| 4 — Observe | Manual | Query Cloud Logging; review Cloud Monitoring metrics and uptime check |
| 5 — Troubleshoot | Manual | Diagnose revision, startup, database, init-job, build, and IAM issues |
| 6 — Tear down | Automated | Delete (Trash) removes all module resources |