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Docmost on Cloud Run — Lab Guide

📖 Configuration Guide

Overview​

Estimated time: 45–90 minutes

Docmost is an open-source, real-time collaborative wiki and documentation platform — a self-hosted Confluence/Notion alternative built on NestJS. This lab takes you through the full operational lifecycle of the Docmost 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 Docmost 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 and create the first workspace and admin account.
  • Perform day-2 operations — inspect, scale, update, and manage secrets and backups.
  • Understand the roles of PostgreSQL, Redis, and NFS in a collaborative-editing workload.
  • 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. Click Deploy in the RAD platform top navigation, open Docmost (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.

  2. The platform provisions the Cloud Run service (port 3000, 1 vCPU / 1 GiB, scale-to-zero), a Cloud SQL (PostgreSQL 15) database with its Secret Manager secrets, Redis for real-time collaboration and job queues (co-located on the NFS server VM by default), an NFS volume mounted at /app/data/storage for uploaded attachments, a GCS data bucket, and an auto-generated APP_SECRET. It builds the container image and runs a one-shot database-initialisation 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="$REGION" \
      --filter="metadata.name~docmost" --format="value(metadata.name)" --limit=1)
    SERVICE_URL=$(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. Docmost's health path is /api/health, which returns HTTP 200 once the app has booted and run its schema migrations (allow up to ~2 minutes on a fresh deploy — the startup probe uses a 60-second initial delay plus a retry window; with min_instance_count = 0 this curl also triggers the cold start):

    curl -s -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code}\n" "$SERVICE_URL/api/health"

  2. Open $SERVICE_URL in a browser. Docmost ships with no default credentials — the first visitor completes the setup form and creates the initial workspace and administrator account. Do this promptly after deploy so no one else can claim the workspace. The auto-generated secrets can be inspected if needed:

    gcloud secrets list --project="$PROJECT" --filter="name~docmost"
    # e.g. the DB password or APP_SECRET:
    gcloud secrets versions access latest --secret=<secret-name> --project="$PROJECT"

  3. Verify the collaboration wiring: create a page and open it in two browser tabs — edits should appear live in both (real-time sync runs over the APP_URL WebSocket endpoint, coordinated through Redis).

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). The default is min = 0 (scale-to-zero) / max = 1; set min_instance_count = 1 to keep the collaboration endpoint warm, and only raise max_instance_count with Redis enabled (it is, by default) so instances stay coordinated.

  3. 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. Docmost runs its schema migrations automatically on boot — there is no separate migration step.

  4. Manage secrets, storage, and jobs. Treat APP_SECRET as immutable — rotating it after first boot logs everyone out and makes data encrypted under the old value unrecoverable:

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

  5. Open a database session for inspection or maintenance:

    INSTANCE=$(gcloud sql instances list --project="$PROJECT" --format="value(name)" --limit=1)
    gcloud sql connect "$INSTANCE" --user=docmost --project="$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 (watch cold starts under scale-to-zero), and CPU / memory utilisation; Cloud SQL metrics live under the SQL page. The module also provisions an uptime check (the endpoint is public by default); 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 Docmost releases.

  • Revision unhealthy / service won't serve: the startup probe targets /api/health with a 60-second initial delay to allow boot-time migrations. Inspect the latest revision and its logs before concluding the service has failed: 
    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 (PostgreSQL 15) instance is RUNNABLE, the DB password secret exists, and the db-init job completed. Note the running service connects to the Cloud SQL private IP over TCP with SSL (Docmost's postgres.js driver cannot parse the Unix-socket path), while the db-init job uses the mounted socket — two different paths that can fail independently.
  • 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"
  • Real-time editing broken / edits don't sync: verify Redis is reachable (enable_redis = true; with redis_host empty the NFS server VM co-hosts Redis — it must be RUNNING), and check that APP_URL in the running revision matches the URL users actually browse to (a mismatch breaks the collaboration WebSocket and absolute links — set it explicitly when using a custom domain).
  • Attachments disappear after a restart: verify enable_nfs = true and the gen2 execution environment — with NFS off, uploads land on ephemeral disk.
  • Image build failed: review Cloud Build history for the failed build's log. The image is custom-built with the DOCMOST_VERSION build ARG (so application_version = "latest" maps to a pinned release).
  • 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 (including APP_SECRET), GCS buckets, the NFS-backed attachment volume, 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 (PostgreSQL 15), Redis, NFS, GCS bucket, secrets, and runs DB init
2 — Access & verifyManual/api/health passes; create the first workspace and admin account; verify real-time editing
3 — OperateManualInspect revisions, scale (Redis-coordinated), update version, manage secrets/backups, DB access
4 — ObserveManualQuery Cloud Logging; review Cloud Monitoring metrics and uptime check
5 — TroubleshootManualDiagnose revision, database, init-job, Redis/collaboration, NFS, build, 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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