Flarum on Cloud Run — Lab Guide

Overview

Estimated time: 45–90 minutes

Flarum is a free, open-source forum and discussion platform — a modern, extensible alternative to traditional bulletin-board software, built on PHP with a JavaScript/Mithril front end. This lab takes you through the full operational lifecycle of the Flarum 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 Flarum forum 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 retrieve the generated admin credential.
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 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]

In the RAD platform, open Flarum (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.
The platform provisions the Cloud Run service, a Cloud SQL (MySQL 8.0) database with its Secret Manager secrets (the auto-generated FLARUM_ADMIN_PASS; the database password is managed separately), a Cloud Filestore (NFS) share for uploaded avatars/attachments, a flarum-assets Cloud Storage bucket plus a default data bucket, builds the container image (a thin wrapper FROM mondedie/flarum), and runs a one-shot database-initialisation job. First deploys take roughly 20–35 minutes (Cloud SQL creation dominates).

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="$REGION" \
  --filter="metadata.name~flarum" --format="value(metadata.name)" --limit=1)
SERVICE_URL=$(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. Flarum serves its public forum home page at / once installed and the database is reachable:
```
curl -s -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code}\n" "$SERVICE_URL/"   # expect 200
```

Retrieve the generated administrator password — the admin username and email are fixed by the module at admin / admin@techequity.cloud and are not exposed as configuration inputs:

SECRET=$(gcloud secrets list --project="$PROJECT" \
  --filter="name~flarum AND name~admin-pass" --format="value(name)" --limit=1)
gcloud secrets versions access latest --secret="$SECRET" --project="$PROJECT"

Open $SERVICE_URL in a browser and sign in with admin / the password retrieved above. FORUM_URL is auto-wired to the predicted run.app service URL on Cloud Run, so absolute links and asset URLs should already be correct. If you later front the service with a custom domain or external HTTPS load balancer, update FORUM_URL via environment_variables to match the actual public hostname, or Flarum will generate links against the stale default.

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 gcloud edit (a manual edit would be reverted on the next apply). Keep max_instance_count at 1 unless you have verified Flarum's behaviour under multiple concurrent instances sharing the same NFS assets volume and database.
Update the application version by changing the application_version input in the RAD platform and applying it via Update; the value is passed through the app-specific FLARUM_VERSION build ARG (not the generic version arg), a new image builds, and a new revision rolls out. latest maps to the mondedie/flarum image's own stable tag.

Manage secrets and backups:

gcloud secrets list --project="$PROJECT" --filter="name~flarum"
gcloud run jobs list --project="$PROJECT" --region="$REGION"   # db-init + scheduled 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 "$INSTANCE" --user=flarum --database=flarum --project="$PROJECT"

Check uploaded assets persistence — avatars and attachments live on Cloud Filestore (NFS) at /flarum/app/public/assets, mounted because enable_nfs = true by default, so they survive restarts and scale-to-zero:
```
gcloud filestore instances list --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=50
```
Logs 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's uptime check is disabled by default (uptime_check_config.enabled = false); enable it via configuration if you want Cloud Monitoring to alert on outages, then confirm it is green under Monitoring → Uptime checks.

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 Flarum releases.

Revision unhealthy / service won't serve: inspect the latest revision and its logs for startup errors. The startup probe is a TCP check on port 8888 with a generous ~5-minute window (failure_threshold=20, period_seconds=15) to accommodate the first-boot installer, and the liveness probe is HTTP GET / with a 300-second initial delay.
```
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: by default (enable_cloudsql_volume = false) Flarum connects to Cloud SQL over direct private-IP TCP through VPC egress, not the Auth Proxy socket. Confirm the Cloud SQL instance is RUNNABLE, VPC egress isn't blocking the private range, and the db-init job completed successfully.

db-init job failed: list executions and read the failed one's logs:

gcloud run jobs executions list --job="${SERVICE}-db-init" \
  --project="$PROJECT" --region="$REGION"

Image build failed: review Cloud Build history for the failed build's log — remember container_image_source must stay custom; switching to prebuilt bypasses the FLARUM_VERSION build-arg mechanism this module relies on.
Locked out of the admin account: the FLARUM_ADMIN_PASS secret is only read on first boot — rotating it afterwards does not change the live admin password; reset it from the Flarum admin UI or the database instead.
403 / permission errors: verify the runtime service account's IAM roles.

See the Configuration Guide's Configuration Pitfalls section for setting-specific gotchas (including the immutability of db_name/db_user after first deploy, and why php_memory_limit/upload_max_filesize/ post_max_size are inert on this module).

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, the Filestore (NFS) share, GCS buckets (flarum-assets and data), 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 (MySQL 8.0), Filestore (NFS), storage buckets, secrets, and runs db-init
2 — Access & verify	Manual	Health check passes; retrieve `FLARUM_ADMIN_PASS` and sign in as `admin`
3 — Operate	Manual	Inspect revisions, scale, update version, manage secrets/backups, DB access, verify NFS persistence
4 — Observe	Manual	Query Cloud Logging; review Cloud Monitoring metrics and (optional) uptime check
5 — Troubleshoot	Manual	Diagnose revision, database, db-init, build, admin-lockout, and IAM issues
6 — Tear down	Automated	Delete (Trash) removes all module resources

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​