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Fider on Cloud Run — Lab Guide

📖 Configuration Guide

Overview​

Estimated time: 45–90 minutes

Fider is an open-source, self-hosted feedback and feature-voting board — customers post ideas, vote, and comment, and you prioritise your roadmap by demand. This lab takes you through the full operational lifecycle of the Fider 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 Fider 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 the service and complete Fider's first-run site/admin setup.
  • Perform day-2 operations — inspect, scale, update, and manage secrets and the database.
  • 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, Filestore NFS, 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 Fider (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 (PostgreSQL 15) database with its Secret Manager secrets (JWT_SECRET and the database password), a Cloud Storage data bucket, a Cloud Filestore NFS mount for attachments (enabled by default), builds the container image, and runs a one-shot database-initialisation job that creates the fider role and database. 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="$REGION" \
      --filter="metadata.name~fider" --format="value(metadata.name)" --limit=1)
    SERVICE_URL=$(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. Fider exposes an unauthenticated /_health endpoint that returns 200 once the server has booted and run its schema migrations:

    curl -s -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code}\n" "$SERVICE_URL/_health"   # expect 200

    Allow up to ~7 minutes on first boot — the startup probe gives a 30-second initial delay plus a 30-failure retry window at a 15-second period while ./fider migrate runs and the server comes up.

  2. Open $SERVICE_URL in a browser. There are no default credentials — the first visit walks you through creating the site and its admin owner account. Complete this immediately after deploy.

  3. Email is disabled for the demo (EMAIL_NOEMAIL = true), so sign-up and invite links are printed to the container log rather than sent. Check the logs if you invite additional users before wiring real SMTP:

    gcloud run services logs read "$SERVICE" --project="$PROJECT" --region="$REGION" --limit=50 \
      | grep -i "sign-in\|invite"

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). Fider has no background worker, so min_instance_count = 0 (scale-to-zero) is data-safe if you prefer to trade a cold start for lower cost; the default min=1 with cpu_always_allocated=true keeps it consistently warm instead.

  3. Update the application version by changing the application_version input in the RAD platform and applying it via Update; a new image builds and a new revision rolls out. Fider's own migrations run again on start (idempotent), so no separate migration step is needed. Note getfider/fider has no :latest tag — the module pins latest to stable; pin an explicit SHA tag for reproducible upgrades.

  4. Manage secrets:

    gcloud secrets list --project="$PROJECT" --filter="name~fider"

    JWT_SECRET signs all authentication and session tokens (including emailed magic sign-in links) — never rotate it after first boot; doing so invalidates every active session and pending sign-in link.

  5. Open a database session for inspection or maintenance:

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

  6. Check the init job and NFS mount:

    gcloud run jobs list --project="$PROJECT" --region="$REGION"
    gcloud filestore instances list --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>". When email is disabled, sign-up / invite links appear here — this is expected, not an error.

  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. If an uptime check is enabled, 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 Fider 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 startup and liveness probes target /_health; allow up to ~7 minutes on first boot for ./fider migrate plus server startup. 
    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 (it idempotently creates the fider role/database and is safe to re-run). 
    gcloud run jobs executions list --job="${SERVICE}-db-init" \
      --project="$PROJECT" --region="$REGION"
  • Blank page / CSP or "invalid origin" style errors: this is a known Foundation-wide Cloud Run behaviour, not a Fider bug — Cloud Run serves a service on two URL aliases (the numeric-project predicted_service_url form injected as BASE_URL, and the random-suffix status.url form). If you browse to the alias that does not match the BASE_URL the app booted with, strict origin/CSP checks can produce a blank page. Confirm which URL the running revision actually injected and use that one consistently, or set a custom BASE_URL (e.g. behind a load balancer / custom domain) so both match: 
    gcloud run revisions describe "$(gcloud run revisions list --service="$SERVICE" \
      --project="$PROJECT" --region="$REGION" --format='value(name)' --limit=1)" \
      --project="$PROJECT" --region="$REGION" --format='value(spec.template.spec.containers[0].env)'
  • NFS-related mount failures: confirm the shared Filestore NFS VM (managed by Services_GCP) is RUNNING before this app was deployed; a stopped/absent NFS server at deploy time is a common cause of storage mount errors. 
    gcloud filestore instances list --project="$PROJECT"
  • Initialisation job failed: list executions and read the failed one's logs (same command as the database section above).
  • 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 & Sensible Defaults section for setting-specific gotchas (including the critical rule never to rotate JWT_SECRET after first boot, and why db_name/db_user are immutable after first deploy).

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, Filestore NFS, registry) are managed separately and are not removed here.

Summary​

TaskTypeOutcome
1 — DeployAutomatedModule provisions Cloud Run, Cloud SQL (PostgreSQL 15), secrets, storage bucket, NFS mount, and runs DB init
2 — Access & verifyManualHealth check passes; create the site and admin owner on first visit
3 — OperateManualInspect revisions, scale, update version, manage secrets, DB access
4 — ObserveManualQuery Cloud Logging; review Cloud Monitoring metrics and uptime check
5 — TroubleshootManualDiagnose revision, database, dual-URL-alias, NFS, init-job, and build issues
6 — Tear downAutomatedDelete (Trash) removes all module resources

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

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