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FreshRSS on GKE Autopilot — Lab Guide

📖 Configuration Guide

Overview​

Estimated time: 45–90 minutes

FreshRSS is a free, self-hosted RSS and Atom feed aggregator — a lightweight, multi-user "news reader" written in PHP that exposes the Google Reader and Fever APIs for mobile clients. This lab takes you through the full operational lifecycle of the FreshRSS 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 FreshRSS 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, including the first-boot install and admin login.
  • Perform day-2 operations — inspect, scale, update, and manage secrets and the database.
  • 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, NFS server, 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]​

  1. Click Deploy in the RAD platform top navigation, open FreshRSS (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.

  2. The platform deploys the workload (PHP/Apache on port 80) into the GKE Autopilot cluster, provisions a Cloud SQL (PostgreSQL 15) database and user with the FRESHRSS_ADMIN_PASSWORD and database-password secrets in Secret Manager, an NFS volume mounted at /var/www/FreshRSS/data (no GCS bucket is created), builds the custom container image, and runs a one-shot db-init job. First deploys take roughly 15–25 minutes (Cloud SQL creation dominates).

  3. 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 freshrss | head -1 | cut -d/ -f2)
    echo "Cluster: $CLUSTER   Namespace: $NS"
    kubectl get all -n "$NS"

Task 2 — Access & verify [Manual]​

  1. Confirm the workload is running and find its external address:

    kubectl get pods,svc -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"

  2. Confirm the service is healthy. FreshRSS serves an unauthenticated /status JSON endpoint that responds once the server is up:

    curl -s "http://${EXTERNAL_IP}/status"   # expect a JSON status response

  3. Retrieve the auto-generated admin password from Secret Manager:

    ADMIN_SECRET=$(gcloud secrets list --project="$PROJECT" \
      --filter="name~freshrss AND name~ADMIN_PASSWORD" --format="value(name)" --limit=1)
    gcloud secrets versions access latest --secret="$ADMIN_SECRET" --project="$PROJECT"

  4. Open http://${EXTERNAL_IP} (or the configured application_domains hostname) in a browser and log in with username admin and the password from step 3. On first request the container's entrypoint runs FreshRSS's own installer (do-install.php + create-user.php), so allow a generous first-boot window before the login page settles — this is idempotent and only runs once. After logging in, change the admin password in the FreshRSS UI — rotating the Secret Manager value alone does not re-set an already-installed account.

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

  1. Inspect the workload — deployment, pods, and PVCs (if a block PVC is used instead of NFS):

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

  2. 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). GKE requires min_instance_count >= 1 (no scale-to-zero), so the in-container feed-refresh cron (CRON_MIN = */15) always fires. Keep max_instance_count at 1 — a single pod owns the refresh cron and the file-based session/cache state on the shared NFS volume. Session affinity (ClientIP) is set by default to keep a client's requests on the same pod.

  3. Update the application version by changing the version input in the RAD platform and applying it via Update; a new image builds and the Deployment rolls out. Because the data dir is NFS-backed, the rollout uses the Recreate strategy (old pod terminates before the new one starts) rather than a rolling update, so two pods never write the shared volume at once — expect a brief gap in availability during an update. application_version = "latest" is pinned to a known-good tag at build time — pin it explicitly for production.

  4. Manage secrets and the database:

    kubectl get secrets -n "$NS"
    gcloud secrets list --project="$PROJECT" --filter="name~freshrss"
    kubectl get jobs -n "$NS"          # db-init (and import job, if enabled)
    gcloud sql backups list --instance=<instance-name> --project="$PROJECT"

  5. Open a database session for inspection or maintenance:

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

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

  1. Logs — from kubectl or the Logs Explorer:

    kubectl logs -n "$NS" deploy/"$(kubectl get deploy -n "$NS" -o jsonpath='{.items[0].metadata.name}')" --tail=50

    Logs Explorer filter: resource.type="k8s_container" AND resource.labels.namespace_name="<namespace>".

  2. Monitoring — open the GKE / Kubernetes dashboards and review pod CPU and memory utilisation, restart counts, and request metrics. uptime_check_config is disabled by default — enable it and review Monitoring → Uptime checks and Alerting → Policies if you want automated availability alerts.

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 FreshRSS releases.

  • Pod not Ready / CrashLoopBackOff: inspect events and logs. The startup probe is a TCP check on port 80; the liveness probe is an HTTP GET on / — a slow first-boot install (schema creation) can exhaust a too-tight threshold. 
    kubectl describe pod -n "$NS" <pod>          # Events section shows scheduling/probe/mount errors
    kubectl logs -n "$NS" <pod> --previous       # logs from the crashed container
  • Database connection errors: confirm the Cloud SQL instance is RUNNABLE, the DB password secret materialised into the namespace, enable_cloudsql_volume = true (Auth Proxy sidecar bound to 127.0.0.1:5432), and the db-init job completed.
  • db-init job failed: inspect the job and its pod logs: 
    kubectl get jobs -n "$NS"
    kubectl logs -n "$NS" job/<job-name>
  • Config/state resets on pod restart: confirm enable_nfs = true (or a block PVC via the Group 7 StatefulSet variables) and nfs_mount_path = /var/www/FreshRSS/data; without persistent storage, config.php and per-user state are lost on every pod restart.
  • Rollout stuck on "Waiting for rollout to finish": expected with Recreate — the old pod must fully terminate (releasing the NFS mount and DB locks) before the new one starts; a stuck termination usually means a lingering connection or a slow graceful-shutdown, not a bad image.
  • 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 & Sensible Defaults section for setting-specific gotchas (including the critical rules around enable_nfs, database_type, and immutable application_database_name/application_database_user).

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 and user, Secret Manager secrets, and the NFS-backed data directory contents. Resources owned by Services_GCP (the VPC, GKE cluster, shared Cloud SQL instance, shared NFS server, registry) are managed separately and are not removed here.

Summary​

TaskTypeOutcome
1 — DeployAutomatedModule deploys the GKE workload, Cloud SQL (PostgreSQL 15), secrets, NFS volume, and runs db-init
2 — Access & verifyManualConnect to the cluster; /status responds; log in as admin and change the password
3 — OperateManualInspect workload, scale, update version (Recreate rollout), manage secrets/DB
4 — ObserveManualQuery Cloud Logging; review Cloud Monitoring metrics and (optional) uptime check
5 — TroubleshootManualDiagnose pod, database, db-init, NFS, and rollout-strategy issues
6 — Tear downAutomatedDelete (Trash) removes all module resources

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

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