Flarum on GKE Autopilot — 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 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 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.
Connect to the GKE cluster, access the running workload, and retrieve the generated admin credential.
Perform day-2 operations — inspect, scale, update, and manage secrets and storage.
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, Cloud SQL, Artifact Registry, and shared service accounts this module depends on).
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 Flarum (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 the workload into the GKE Autopilot cluster, provisions 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, 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).

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"

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

Task 2 — Access & verify [Manual]

Confirm the workload is running and find its external address (a static IP is reserved by default, so it survives redeploys):

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

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" "http://${EXTERNAL_IP}/"   # 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 http://${EXTERNAL_IP} in a browser and sign in with admin / the password retrieved above. FORUM_URL is a known gap on this variant — it is NOT set automatically. Set it once the external IP or custom domain is known, or Flarum will generate incorrect absolute links, asset URLs, and redirects:
```
SERVICE_NAME=$(kubectl get deploy -n "$NAMESPACE" -o jsonpath='{.items[0].metadata.name}')
kubectl patch deploy "$SERVICE_NAME" -n "$NAMESPACE" \
  -p '{"spec":{"template":{"spec":{"containers":[{"name":"flarum","env":[
    {"name":"FORUM_URL","value":"http://'"${EXTERNAL_IP}"'"}]}]}}}}'
```
Note that a manual kubectl patch is overwritten on the next Update — set FORUM_URL permanently via the module's environment_variables input once you know the durable public address.

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

Inspect the workload — deployment and pods:

kubectl get deploy,pods,pvc -n "$NAMESPACE"
kubectl describe deploy -n "$NAMESPACE"

Scale by changing the min/max instance inputs and clicking Update on the deployment details page — the module owns the workload spec, so scaling is a configuration change, not a manual kubectl scale (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 pods sharing the same NFS assets volume and database. Session affinity (ClientIP) is set by default to keep a client routed to the same pod.
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 — because the workload is NFS-backed — the rollout uses the Recreate strategy (old pod terminates before the new one starts) rather than a rolling update, to avoid two pods deadlocking on the shared NFS volume and database.

Manage secrets and storage:

kubectl get secrets -n "$NAMESPACE"
gcloud secrets list --project="$PROJECT" --filter="name~flarum"
kubectl get jobs -n "$NAMESPACE"          # db-init job

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, and shared across pods:
```
gcloud filestore instances list --project="$PROJECT"
```

Task 4 — Observe: Logging & Monitoring [Manual]

Logs — from kubectl or the Logs Explorer:
```
kubectl logs -n "$NAMESPACE" deploy/"$(kubectl get deploy -n "$NAMESPACE" -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 request metrics. The module can provision an uptime check (when enabled); 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 Flarum releases.

Pod not Ready / CrashLoopBackOff: inspect events and logs. 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.
```
kubectl describe pod -n "$NAMESPACE" <pod>          # Events section shows scheduling/probe/mount errors
kubectl logs -n "$NAMESPACE" <pod> --previous       # logs from the crashed container
```
Database connection errors: on GKE, Flarum connects through the Cloud SQL Auth Proxy sidecar on 127.0.0.1:3306 (enable_cloudsql_volume = true, required whenever a real database engine is configured). Confirm the Cloud SQL instance is RUNNABLE, the sidecar container is healthy, and the db-init job completed.

db-init job failed: inspect the job and its pod logs:

kubectl get jobs -n "$NAMESPACE"
kubectl logs -n "$NAMESPACE" job/<db-init-job-name>

Pending pod / no external IP: check kubectl describe pod events for resource or quota issues, and confirm the LoadBalancer Service has an assigned IP (reserve_static_ip = true by default keeps it stable across redeploys).
Broken links / assets pointing at the wrong host: confirm FORUM_URL was set to the real external IP or custom domain — this variant does not auto-inject it (see Task 2, step 4).
Image pull errors: confirm the image exists in Artifact Registry and the node service account can pull it.
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.

See the Configuration Guide's Configuration Pitfalls section for setting-specific gotchas (including the immutability of application_database_name/application_database_user after first deploy, and the plan-time validations around enable_redis/redis_host/enable_nfs and min_instance_count ≤ max_instance_count).

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 and namespace, Cloud SQL database, Secret Manager secrets, the Filestore (NFS) share, the flarum-assets GCS bucket, and Artifact Registry images. Resources owned by Services_GCP (the VPC, GKE cluster, shared Cloud SQL, registry) are managed separately and are not removed here.

Summary

Task	Type	Outcome
1 — Deploy	Automated	Module deploys the GKE workload, Cloud SQL (MySQL 8.0), Filestore (NFS), storage bucket, secrets, and runs db-init
2 — Access & verify	Manual	Connect to the cluster; health check passes; retrieve `FLARUM_ADMIN_PASS`, sign in as `admin`, and set `FORUM_URL`
3 — Operate	Manual	Inspect workload, scale, update version (Recreate rollout), manage secrets/storage, DB access, verify NFS persistence
4 — Observe	Manual	Query Cloud Logging; review Cloud Monitoring metrics and (optional) uptime check
5 — Troubleshoot	Manual	Diagnose pod, database, db-init, scheduling, image-pull, and FORUM_URL 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​