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Hoppscotch on Cloud Run — Lab Guide

📖 Configuration Guide

Overview​

Estimated time: 20–40 minutes

Hoppscotch is an open-source, Postman-style API development platform for designing, sending, and inspecting HTTP, GraphQL, and WebSocket requests from the browser. This lab takes you through the full operational lifecycle of the Hoppscotch 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 Hoppscotch 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, and update the deployment.
  • 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, 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]​

  1. In the RAD platform, open Hoppscotch (Cloud Run), 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 builds a thin custom container image (FROM hoppscotch/hoppscotch-frontend) with Cloud Build, mirrors it into Artifact Registry, and provisions a Cloud Run service listening on port 3000. Hoppscotch is deliberately stateless — no Cloud SQL instance, no Secret Manager secrets, and no Cloud Storage bucket are created. With no database to provision, a first deploy typically completes in a few minutes once the image build finishes.

  3. When it completes, discover the resource with a name-agnostic filter (so the command keeps working regardless of the deployment suffix):

    SERVICE=$(gcloud run services list --project="$PROJECT" --region="$REGION" \
      --filter="metadata.name~hoppscotch" --format="value(metadata.name)" --limit=1)
    SERVICE_URL=$(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]​

  1. Confirm the service is serving. Hoppscotch has no backend to be reachable from — the root path returns the app UI as soon as Caddy binds port 3000:

    curl -sS -o /dev/null -w '%{http_code}\n' "$SERVICE_URL/"   # expect 200

  2. Open $SERVICE_URL in a browser. Unlike most modules, Hoppscotch has no first-run admin account to create — the self-hosted frontend has no login or user management of its own. You can start building requests immediately. Collections, environments, and history are kept in the browser's local storage on each user's machine, not on the server.

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). Because Hoppscotch keeps no shared queue or database, scaling is unconstrained — raise max_instance_count freely as a cost/throughput ceiling. The default min_instance_count = 0 scales to zero between requests; the first request after idle incurs a brief cold start, which is cheap for a static SPA.

  3. Update the application version by changing the version input in the RAD platform and applying it via Update; a new image builds and a new revision rolls out. HOPPSCOTCH_VERSION (not the generic APP_VERSION) pins the upstream hoppscotch-frontend tag, so application_version = "latest" resolves to a pinned, known-good tag at build time rather than the literal string latest.

  4. Check secrets — Hoppscotch provisions none by design; confirm nothing unexpected shows up:

    gcloud secrets list --project="$PROJECT" --filter="name~hoppscotch"

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, instance count (scaling behaviour), and CPU / memory utilisation. The module can provision an uptime check against /; confirm it is green under Monitoring → Uptime checks, and review 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 Hoppscotch releases.

  • Revision unhealthy / service won't serve: inspect the latest revision and its logs. The startup and liveness probes target the root /, which returns HTTP 200 within seconds of Caddy binding port 3000 — a failing probe almost always means the image tag is invalid, not that a backend is unreachable (there is no backend). 
    gcloud run revisions list --service="$SERVICE" --project="$PROJECT" --region="$REGION"
    gcloud run services logs read "$SERVICE" --project="$PROJECT" --region="$REGION" --limit=100
  • Image build failed: review Cloud Build history for the failed build's log — an invalid application_version tag most commonly surfaces as MANIFEST_UNKNOWN. 
    gcloud builds list --project="$PROJECT" --region="$REGION" --limit=5
  • Wrong container port: the frontend serves only on port 3000; confirm container_port = 3000 if the startup probe never passes.
  • 403 / permission errors: verify the runtime service account's IAM roles.

See the Configuration Guide's Configuration Pitfalls section for setting-specific gotchas (including why container_image_source must stay custom and why database_type/enable_cloudsql_volume should stay off).

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 and its Artifact Registry image (Hoppscotch provisions no database, secrets, or storage buckets, so there is nothing else to clean up). Resources owned by Services_GCP (the VPC, shared registry) are managed separately and are not removed here.

Summary​

TaskTypeOutcome
1 — DeployAutomatedModule builds the custom image and provisions the Cloud Run service — no database, secrets, or storage bucket
2 — Access & verifyManualHealth check passes; open the URL and start using Hoppscotch immediately (no admin account)
3 — OperateManualInspect revisions, scale (unconstrained), update version, confirm no secrets
4 — ObserveManualQuery Cloud Logging; review Cloud Monitoring metrics and uptime check
5 — TroubleshootManualDiagnose revision, build, port, and IAM issues
6 — Tear downAutomatedDelete (Trash) removes the Cloud Run service and image

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

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