DokuWiki on GKE Autopilot — Lab Guide

Overview

Estimated time: 45–90 minutes

DokuWiki is a lightweight, standards-compliant flat-file wiki — it stores all pages, media, users, and configuration as files on disk, with no database. This lab takes you through the full operational lifecycle of the DokuWiki on GKE Autopilot 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 GKE module and the Google Cloud platform, not on DokuWiki 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.
Connect to the GKE cluster and access the running workload.
Perform day-2 operations — inspect, scale (deliberately not), update, and manage the block PVC that holds all wiki content.
Observe the workload 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, GKE Autopilot cluster, Artifact Registry, and shared service accounts this module depends on). DokuWiki uses no database, so Cloud SQL is not required for this module.
A Google Cloud project with billing enabled.
gcloud CLI and kubectl installed; gcloud auth login and gcloud auth application-default login completed.
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 DokuWiki (GKE) 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 deploys DokuWiki into the GKE Autopilot cluster as a StatefulSet backed by a durable block PersistentVolumeClaim mounted at /storage (default 10Gi), and builds/mirrors the container image. There is no database (database_type = "NONE"), no Redis, and no runtime secrets — the admin account is created interactively later, via the installer. First deploys typically take 10–20 minutes (no Cloud SQL provisioning to wait on).

Connect to the cluster and discover the namespace with name-agnostic filters:

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

NS=$(kubectl get ns -o name | grep dokuwiki | head -1 | cut -d/ -f2)
echo "Cluster: $CLUSTER   Namespace: $NS"
kubectl get all,pvc -n "$NS"

Task 2 — Access & verify [Manual]

Confirm the StatefulSet pod is running and find the wiki's external address:

kubectl get statefulset,pods,svc,pvc -n "$NS"
EXTERNAL_IP=$(kubectl get svc -n "$NS" \
  -o jsonpath='{.items[?(@.spec.type=="LoadBalancer")].status.loadBalancer.ingress[0].ip}')
echo "External IP: $EXTERNAL_IP"

Confirm the wiki is healthy. Startup, liveness, and readiness probes all target /, which DokuWiki serves without authentication — the pod becomes Ready as soon as Apache is up (no database migrations to wait for):
```
curl -s -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code}\n" "http://${EXTERNAL_IP}/"   # expect 200
```
Open http://${EXTERNAL_IP}/install.php in a browser to run the first-run installer — set the wiki title, create the administrator account, and choose the ACL policy. The account is written straight to the /storage PVC; there is no pre-seeded admin credential anywhere in Secret Manager. Immediately after setup, block install.php from further access — anyone who reaches it before you finish setup can claim the admin account. install.php ships as part of the DokuWiki image's web root (not on the /storage PVC), so it survives pod restarts; block it at the load balancer / ingress layer (a path-based deny rule) or via a follow-up image change, rather than trying to delete it from the running container.
```
kubectl get ingress -n "$NS"          # check for an ingress you can add a deny rule to
```

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

Inspect the workload — StatefulSet, pods, and the bound PVC:

kubectl get statefulset,pods,pvc -n "$NS"
kubectl describe statefulset -n "$NS"

Do not scale past 1 replica. Each StatefulSet pod gets its own separate PVC — DokuWiki has no built-in clustering or shared storage, so a second replica does not mirror the first; it starts an empty wiki. Keep min_instance_count / max_instance_count at 1 in the RAD platform for a shared wiki. Scaling (if ever needed for a deliberate multi-wiki use case) is a configuration change via Update, not a manual kubectl scale — the module owns the workload spec and a manual edit would be reverted on the next apply.
Update the application version by changing the version input in the RAD platform and applying it via Update; a new image builds and rolls out. DokuWiki has no migration step — the new engine reads the same /storage data.

Inspect the PVC and browse wiki content:

kubectl describe pvc -n "$NS"
POD=$(kubectl get pods -n "$NS" -o jsonpath='{.items[0].metadata.name}')
kubectl exec -n "$NS" "$POD" -- ls -la /storage/data/pages
kubectl exec -n "$NS" "$POD" -- du -sh /storage

Back up the wiki before any risky change (there is no database to dump — the PVC is the entire wiki):

kubectl exec -n "$NS" "$POD" -- tar czf /tmp/dokuwiki-backup.tar.gz -C /storage .
kubectl cp "$NS/$POD:/tmp/dokuwiki-backup.tar.gz" ./dokuwiki-backup.tar.gz

Confirm there are no secrets or jobs to manage (both are true by design for this module):

kubectl get secrets -n "$NS"
kubectl get jobs -n "$NS"          # expect none — no init job for DokuWiki

Task 4 — Observe: Logging & Monitoring [Manual]

Logs — from kubectl or the Logs Explorer:
```
kubectl logs -n "$NS" statefulset/"$(kubectl get statefulset -n "$NS" -o jsonpath='{.items[0].metadata.name}')" --tail=50
```
Logs Explorer filter: resource.type="k8s_container" AND resource.labels.namespace_name="<namespace>".
Monitoring — open the GKE / Kubernetes dashboards and review pod CPU and memory utilisation, restart counts, and PVC disk usage. The module can provision an uptime check (when the endpoint is publicly reachable); review Monitoring → Uptime checks and 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 DokuWiki releases.

Pod not Ready / CrashLoopBackOff: inspect events and logs. Because the probe targets / with no auth and no database dependency, a Ready failure almost always points to a scheduling, image-pull, or PVC-mount problem rather than an application error.
```
kubectl describe pod -n "$NS" <pod>          # Events section shows scheduling/probe/mount errors
kubectl logs -n "$NS" <pod> --previous       # logs from the crashed container
```
Pending pod / PVC not binding: check the PVC status and events; on a quota-constrained project a StorageClass defaulting to SSD can exhaust the regional SSD quota faster than expected.
```
kubectl get pvc -n "$NS"
kubectl describe pvc -n "$NS"
```
Wiki content "reset" or empty after a change: confirm you did not delete or replace the PVC (or the StatefulSet along with its PVC) — the PVC is the wiki. Recreating the StatefulSet alone does not touch the PVC, but deleting the PVC or the whole namespace does.
Multiple replicas show different content: this is expected, not a bug — each StatefulSet pod has its own PVC. Scale back to 1 replica for a shared wiki.
install.php still reachable / admin not created: revisit Task 2 — confirm the installer actually ran and wrote to /storage, and that the file was removed or blocked afterward.
Pending pod / no external IP: check kubectl describe pod events for resource or quota issues, and confirm the LoadBalancer Service has an assigned IP.
Image pull errors: confirm the image exists in Artifact Registry and the node service account can pull it.

See the Configuration Guide's Configuration Pitfalls section for setting-specific gotchas (including the critical rule to keep database_type = "NONE", never change stateful_pvc_mount_path away from /storage, and never set workload_type = "Deployment" alongside stateful_pvc_enabled = true).

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 Kubernetes workload, namespace, and the block PVC holding all wiki content (back it up first if you need to keep it — see Task 3), plus the Artifact Registry images. Resources owned by Services_GCP (the VPC, GKE cluster, shared registry) are managed separately and are not removed here.

Summary

Task	Type	Outcome
1 — Deploy	Automated	Module deploys a StatefulSet with a block PVC (`/storage`) and builds the image; no database, no secrets
2 — Access & verify	Manual	Connect to the cluster; health check passes; run the `/install.php` wizard and then block it
3 — Operate	Manual	Inspect workload, keep replicas at 1, update version, browse/back up the PVC
4 — Observe	Manual	Query Cloud Logging; review Cloud Monitoring metrics and uptime check
5 — Troubleshoot	Manual	Diagnose pod, PVC, replica-content, and image-pull issues
6 — Tear down	Automated	Delete (Trash) removes the workload and PVC — back up content first

By Dr Shiyghan Emmanuel Navti · Google Cloud certified: ACE · PCA · PCD · PDE · PSE · CDL

Overview​

Objectives​

Prerequisites​

Task 1 — Deploy the module [Automated]​

Task 2 — Access & verify [Manual]​

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

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

Task 5 — Troubleshoot & debug [Manual]​

Task 6 — Tear down [Automated]​

Summary​