Ghost on Cloud Run — Lab Guide

📖 Configuration Guide

Overview

Estimated time: 45–90 minutes

Ghost is a modern open-source publishing platform for blogs, newsletters, and membership sites. This lab takes you through the full operational lifecycle of the Ghost 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 Ghost 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 and verify the running service.
• 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

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Task 1 — Deploy the module [Automated]

1. Click Deploy in the RAD platform top navigation, open Ghost (Cloud Run) 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 provisions the Cloud Run service, a Cloud SQL (MySQL 8.0) database with its Secret Manager secrets, a Filestore NFS share for shared content, a dedicated ghost-content GCS bucket, builds the container image, and runs a one-shot database-initialisation job. 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="$REGION" \
     --filter="metadata.name~ghost" --format="value(metadata.name)" --limit=1)
   SERVICE_URL=$(gcloud run services describe "$SERVICE" \
     --project="$PROJECT" --region="$REGION" --format="value(status.url)")
   echo "Service: $SERVICE"
   echo "URL:     $SERVICE_URL"

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Task 2 — Access & verify [Manual]

1. Confirm the service is healthy. Ghost's health path is /, which returns HTTP 200 once Ghost has finished running database migrations and compiling themes on first boot (allow up to 90 seconds on a fresh deploy):

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

2. Open ${SERVICE_URL}/ghost in a browser to reach the Ghost admin panel. On first boot Ghost presents an interactive setup wizard — enter your site title, admin name, email, and password to complete setup. The database password (the only credential stored in Secret Manager) can be retrieved if needed:

   DB_SECRET=$(gcloud secrets list --project="$PROJECT" \
     --filter="name~ghost" --format="value(name)" --limit=1)
   gcloud secrets versions access latest --secret="$DB_SECRET" --project="$PROJECT"

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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).

3. Update the application version by changing the version input via Update on the deployment details page; a new image builds and a new revision rolls out.

4. Manage secrets, storage, and jobs:

   gcloud secrets list --project="$PROJECT" --filter="name~ghost"
   gcloud run jobs list --project="$PROJECT" --region="$REGION"   # db-init + backup jobs
   gcloud storage buckets list --project="$PROJECT" --filter="name~ghost"

5. Open a database session for inspection or maintenance:

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

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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>".

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. The module also provisions an uptime check; confirm it is green under Monitoring → Uptime checks, and review Alerting → Policies.

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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 Ghost releases.

• Revision unhealthy / service won't serve: Ghost has a 90-second startup probe initial delay to allow database migrations and theme compilation on first boot. Inspect the latest revision and its logs before concluding the service has failed:

  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 (MySQL 8.0) instance is RUNNABLE, the DB password secret exists, and the db-init job completed successfully.
• Initialisation job failed: list executions and read the failed one's logs:

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

• NFS mount / content not shared: verify enable_nfs = true and that the execution environment is gen2 (required for Filestore mounts in Cloud Run).
• Image build failed: review Cloud Build history for the failed build's log. The container_image_source must be custom — the upstream Ghost image lacks the entrypoint that maps DB credentials and detects the service URL.
• 403 / permission errors: verify the runtime service account's IAM roles.

See the Configuration Guide's Configuration Pitfalls section for setting-specific gotchas.

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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 (including the ghost-content bucket), Filestore NFS share, and Artifact Registry images. Resources owned by Services_GCP (the VPC, shared Cloud SQL, registry) are managed separately and are not removed here.

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Summary

Task	Type	Outcome
1 — Deploy	Automated	Module provisions Cloud Run, Cloud SQL (MySQL 8.0), NFS, GCS bucket, secrets, and runs DB init
2 — Access & verify	Manual	Health check passes; complete the Ghost admin setup wizard
3 — Operate	Manual	Inspect revisions, scale, update version, manage secrets/backups/storage, DB access
4 — Observe	Manual	Query Cloud Logging; review Cloud Monitoring metrics and uptime check
5 — Troubleshoot	Manual	Diagnose revision, database, init-job, NFS, build, and IAM issues
6 — Tear down	Automated	Delete (Trash) removes all module resources