Gokapi on GKE Autopilot — Lab Guide

Overview

Estimated time: 45–90 minutes

Gokapi is a lightweight, self-hosted file-sharing server written in Go — a self-hosted alternative to WeTransfer, generating shareable download links with optional expiry, download-count limits, and password protection. This lab takes you through the full operational lifecycle of the Gokapi 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 Gokapi 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, and claim the administrator account.
Perform day-2 operations — inspect the workload, scale correctly, update the version, and manage the optional API key and PVC 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, 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 Gokapi (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 Gokapi into the GKE Autopilot cluster as a single-pod StatefulSet with a 20Gi block Persistent Volume Claim mounted at /data — this PVC is Gokapi's persistence for both its internal SQLite database and every uploaded file (there is no Cloud SQL instance; database_type is fixed to NONE). A Kubernetes Gateway with a reserved static external IP is provisioned by default (enable_custom_domain = true, reserve_static_ip = true), giving Gokapi a public endpoint out of the box. No database-initialisation job runs — Gokapi manages its own storage. Because there is no Cloud SQL instance to provision, first deploys are considerably faster than database-backed modules — typically 10–20 minutes, dominated by node provisioning, the image build, and Gateway propagation.

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 gokapi | head -1 | cut -d/ -f2)
echo "Cluster: $CLUSTER   Namespace: $NS"
kubectl get all,statefulset,pvc -n "$NS"

Task 2 — Access & verify [Manual]

Confirm the workload is running and find its public address. Because service_type defaults to ClusterIP, the public entry point is the Gateway/HTTPRoute, not the Kubernetes Service directly:
```
kubectl get pods,svc,statefulset,pvc -n "$NS"
kubectl get gateway,httproute -n "$NS"
gcloud compute addresses list --project="$PROJECT"   # the reserved static IP
```
The default hostname is <reserved-ip>.nip.io unless a custom domain was configured via application_domains.
Confirm the service is up. Gokapi's health probes hit the public root, so a plain curl is a sufficient liveness check (no API endpoint or auth required):
```
curl -s -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code}\n" "http://<reserved-ip>.nip.io/"   # expect 200
```
Open http://<reserved-ip>.nip.io in a browser immediately. Gokapi has no pre-seeded admin credential — on first visit it serves its own first-run setup wizard, and whoever reaches it first claims the administrator account. Because the Gateway is public by default, don't leave this step for later.

Confirm data is actually landing on the PVC once you've used the UI to upload a file:

POD=$(kubectl get pods -n "$NS" -o jsonpath='{.items[0].metadata.name}')
kubectl exec -n "$NS" "$POD" -- ls -la /data/config /data/data

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

Inspect the workload — StatefulSet, pod, and PVC:

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

Do not scale beyond one pod. min_instance_count = 1 / max_instance_count = 1 is a hard operational limit, not a tunable default — Gokapi's SQLite database is single-writer with no clustering or replication story, so raising max_instance_count risks database corruption and inconsistent uploads. There is nothing to configure here; leave both at 1.
Update the application version by changing the version input in the RAD platform and applying it via Update. Gokapi's Dockerfile resolves the platform's latest default to a pinned, known-good tag (v1.9.6) via an app-specific build argument, so leaving the version at latest is safe and reproducible; pin explicitly if you need a different release. A new image builds and the StatefulSet's single pod is replaced.
Manage the optional operator API key and PVC-backed storage:
```
kubectl get secrets -n "$NS"
gcloud secrets list --project="$PROJECT" --filter="name~api-key"
kubectl get pvc -n "$NS"
```
The API key (only present if enable_api_key = true was set at deploy time) is a convenience only — Gokapi's real upload/download API keys are normally minted from the admin UI after setup. It's injected as a native Kubernetes Secret and exposed via the gokapi_api_key_secret_id module output.
Inspect the PVC contents directly for a snapshot of persisted state (there is no database session to open — Gokapi has no Cloud SQL instance):
```
kubectl exec -n "$NS" statefulset/<service-name> -- ls -la /data/config /data/data
```

Task 4 — Observe: Logging & Monitoring [Manual]

Logs — from kubectl or the Logs Explorer:
```
kubectl logs -n "$NS" statefulset/<service-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 (Gokapi is a lightweight Go binary, so expect low steady-state usage), restart counts, and PVC disk usage. The module can provision an uptime check (disabled by default); review Monitoring → Uptime checks and Alerting → Policies if enabled.

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 Gokapi releases.

Pod not Ready / CrashLoopBackOff: inspect events and logs. Both the startup and liveness probes target / (unauthenticated, no dependency on an external database), so a failure here usually points at the PVC mount or scheduling rather than the app itself.
```
kubectl describe pod -n "$NS" <pod>          # Events section shows scheduling/probe/mount errors
kubectl logs -n "$NS" <pod> --previous       # logs from the crashed container
```
PVC stuck Pending / Quota 'SSD_TOTAL_GB' exceeded: the default stateful_pvc_storage_class = "standard-rwo" is SSD-backed and draws the (often tight) regional SSD quota. Gokapi's I/O pattern does not need SSD-level IOPS — override to HDD with -var stateful_pvc_storage_class=standard if quota is scarce.
```
kubectl get pvc -n "$NS"
kubectl describe pvc -n "$NS" <pvc-name>
```
No external IP / Gateway not reachable: confirm enable_custom_domain and reserve_static_ip are both true, and that a static IP was actually reserved:
```
kubectl get gateway,httproute -n "$NS"
gcloud compute addresses list --project="$PROJECT"
```
Someone else claimed the administrator account first: because the first-run setup wizard is public and unauthenticated by default, there is no built-in recovery — plan to claim it immediately after the workload becomes reachable.
Optional API key secret not found: confirm enable_api_key was set to true at deploy time — it defaults to false and no secret is created otherwise.
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 why max_instance_count and stateful_pvc_mount_path must be left at their defaults).

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 StatefulSet, namespace, the PVC (and with it the SQLite database and every uploaded file — there is no separate backup of this data by default), the optional API key secret, and Artifact Registry images. Resources owned by Services_GCP (the VPC, GKE cluster, Artifact Registry) are managed separately and are not removed here.

Summary

Task	Type	Outcome
1 — Deploy	Automated	Module deploys a single-pod StatefulSet with a 20Gi PVC, a public Gateway with a reserved static IP, and builds the pinned Gokapi image
2 — Access & verify	Manual	Connect to the cluster; health check passes; claim the first-run admin account immediately (public by default)
3 — Operate	Manual	Inspect workload, keep scaling at 1, update version, manage optional API key/PVC
4 — Observe	Manual	Query Cloud Logging; review Cloud Monitoring metrics and (optional) uptime check
5 — Troubleshoot	Manual	Diagnose pod, PVC/SSD-quota, Gateway, admin-claim race, and image-pull issues
6 — Tear down	Automated	Delete (Trash) removes all module resources, including the SQLite DB and uploads

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​