Ghostfolio on Cloud Run — Lab Guide

Overview

Estimated time: 45–90 minutes

Ghostfolio is an open-source wealth management application for tracking net worth, investment portfolios, and asset allocation across multiple brokerage accounts. This lab takes you through the full operational lifecycle of the Ghostfolio 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 Ghostfolio 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, including its combined DB+Redis health check.
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 Ghostfolio (Cloud Run), set project_id, and review the inputs. Configure only what you need — the Configuration Guide documents every input by group, with defaults. Note that enable_redis defaults to true and is REQUIRED — do not disable it. 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 (PostgreSQL 15) database with its Secret Manager secrets (ACCESS_TOKEN_SALT, JWT_SECRET_KEY, and the database password), builds the container image, 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="$REGION" \
  --filter="metadata.name~ghostfolio" --format="value(metadata.name)" --limit=1)
SERVICE_URL=$(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 and connected to BOTH its database AND Redis. Ghostfolio's health endpoint checks both dependencies and returns 503 until both are reachable:

curl -s -o /dev/null -w '%{http_code}\n' "$SERVICE_URL/api/v1/health"   # expect 200
curl -s "$SERVICE_URL/api/v1/health"                                    # expect {"status":"OK"}

Open $SERVICE_URL in a browser. Ghostfolio has no email/password login form — click Get Started and the app mints a random anonymous "Security Token" as your account owner credential. Save this token; it is your only credential for this account (there is no recovery email). There is no admin account to bootstrap and no sign-up toggle to disable afterward.

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).
Update the application version tag by changing the version input in the RAD platform and applying it via Update; a new image builds and a new revision rolls out. Unlike many prebuilt-image modules in this catalogue, Ghostfolio's latest tag is genuinely valid on Docker Hub, so latest tracks the newest published release.

Manage secrets and backups:

gcloud secrets list --project="$PROJECT" --filter="name~ghostfolio"
gcloud run jobs list --project="$PROJECT" --region="$REGION"   # init jobs

Open a database session for inspection or maintenance:

INSTANCE=$(gcloud sql instances list --project="$PROJECT" --format="value(name)" --limit=1)
gcloud sql connect "$INSTANCE" --user=ghostfolio --project="$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 can provision an uptime check (when uptime_check_config.enabled = true — it defaults to false); if enabled, 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 Ghostfolio releases.

Revision unhealthy / service won't serve: inspect the latest revision and its logs for startup errors. The startup probe targets /api/v1/health, which fails until BOTH the database AND Redis are reachable — a 503 here often means Redis is not yet reachable, not a database problem.
```
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 initialisation job completed successfully. Recall that Ghostfolio's DATABASE_URL always connects over the private Cloud SQL IP (never the Unix-socket path) with sslmode=require.
Redis connection errors: if redis_host was left empty, confirm the platform NFS server VM is RUNNING (enable_nfs or a discovered Services_GCP NFS instance); otherwise REDIS_HOST is empty and the health check never passes.

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"

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 section for setting-specific gotchas (including the critical rule never to rotate ACCESS_TOKEN_SALT after first boot).

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). Delete removes everything the module created — the Cloud Run service, Cloud SQL database, Secret Manager secrets, and Artifact Registry images. Resources owned by Services_GCP (the VPC, shared Cloud SQL, registry, NFS Redis host) are managed separately and are not removed here.

Summary

Task	Type	Outcome
1 — Deploy	Automated	Module provisions Cloud Run, Cloud SQL (PostgreSQL 15), secrets, and runs DB init
2 — Access & verify	Manual	Health check passes (DB + Redis); mint an anonymous Security Token via "Get Started"
3 — Operate	Manual	Inspect revisions, scale, update version, manage secrets/backups, DB access
4 — Observe	Manual	Query Cloud Logging; review Cloud Monitoring metrics and uptime check
5 — Troubleshoot	Manual	Diagnose revision, database, Redis, init-job, build, 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​