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Karakeep on Cloud Run — Lab Guide

📖 Configuration Guide

Overview​

Estimated time: 30–60 minutes

Karakeep is an open-source, self-hostable bookmark-everything app with AI-based automatic tagging and full-text search. This lab takes you through the full operational lifecycle of the Karakeep 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 Karakeep 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, including the required Meilisearch search sidecar.
  • Access and verify the running service, and create the first (admin) account.
  • Perform day-2 operations — inspect, scale limitations, update, and manage backups.
  • Observe the service and its search sidecar with Cloud Logging and Cloud Monitoring.
  • Diagnose and resolve the most common deployment and runtime issues, including a degraded-but-running search sidecar.
  • Tear the deployment down cleanly.

Prerequisites​

  • Services_GCP deployed in the target project (provides the VPC, NFS/Filestore, 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 Karakeep (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 provisions the Cloud Run service, the required internal-only Meilisearch search sidecar as a second Cloud Run service, the two application secrets (NEXTAUTH_SECRET, MEILI_MASTER_KEY), and mounts the shared NFS volume for both. There is no Cloud SQL step — first deploys are noticeably faster than database-backed modules, typically 5–10 minutes.

  3. When it completes, discover the resources with name-agnostic filters:

    SERVICE=$(gcloud run services list --project="$PROJECT" --region="$REGION" \
      --filter="metadata.name~karakeep AND NOT metadata.name~meilisearch" --format="value(metadata.name)" --limit=1)
    SERVICE_URL=$(gcloud run services describe "$SERVICE" \
      --project="$PROJECT" --region="$REGION" --format="value(status.url)")
    echo "Service: $SERVICE"
    echo "URL:     $SERVICE_URL"
    MEILI_SERVICE=$(gcloud run services list --project="$PROJECT" --region="$REGION" \
      --filter="metadata.name~meilisearch" --format="value(metadata.name)" --limit=1)
    echo "Meilisearch sidecar: $MEILI_SERVICE"

Task 2 — Access & verify [Manual]​

  1. Confirm the service is healthy and serving:

    curl -s "$SERVICE_URL/" -o /dev/null -w '%{http_code} %{size_download}\n'   # expect 200 and >0 bytes

  2. Open $SERVICE_URL in a browser. Karakeep shows its sign-up/login page. Create the first account — there is no pre-seeded admin credential; whoever registers first automatically becomes the admin. After creating it, save a bookmark (any URL) to confirm the SQLite-over-NFS write path works — the bookmark should appear in your library and remain there after a page refresh. Optionally search for it by a keyword in its title to confirm the Meilisearch sidecar is reachable and indexing.

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

  1. Inspect the service and its revisions:

    gcloud run services describe "$SERVICE" --project="$PROJECT" --region="$REGION"
    gcloud run revisions list --service="$SERVICE" --project="$PROJECT" --region="$REGION"

  2. Do not raise max_instance_count above 1. Unlike most modules in this catalogue, Karakeep's max_instance_count is pinned by design — multiple Cloud Run instances writing the same SQLite file over NFS risks corruption. There is no supported way to scale Karakeep horizontally in this module.

  3. Update the application version tag by changing the version input in the RAD platform and applying it via Update; a new revision rolls out (no rebuild — the image is pulled directly from ghcr.io/karakeep-app/karakeep).

  4. Manage secrets:

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

  5. Inspect the Meilisearch sidecar independently:

    gcloud run services describe "$MEILI_SERVICE" --project="$PROJECT" --region="$REGION"
    gcloud run services logs read "$MEILI_SERVICE" --project="$PROJECT" --region="$REGION" --limit=50

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

  1. Logs — the main app and the search sidecar log independently:

    gcloud run services logs read "$SERVICE" --project="$PROJECT" --region="$REGION" --limit=50
    gcloud run services logs read "$MEILI_SERVICE" --project="$PROJECT" --region="$REGION" --limit=50

  2. Monitoring — open the Cloud Run dashboard for both services and review request count, latency, instance count, and CPU/memory utilisation independently — a healthy main app with a struggling sidecar looks fine on the main app's own dashboard, so check both.

Task 5 — Troubleshoot & debug [Manual]​

  • Revision unhealthy / service won't serve: inspect the latest revision and its logs. The startup probe targets / with a 30-second initial delay. 
    gcloud run revisions list --service="$SERVICE" --project="$PROJECT" --region="$REGION"
    gcloud run services logs read "$SERVICE" --project="$PROJECT" --region="$REGION" --limit=100
  • App loads but search returns nothing: the Meilisearch sidecar is likely down or MEILI_ADDR failed to inject. Check the sidecar's own revision status and logs (see Task 3, step 5) — bookmarking still works in this state, which makes it an easy-to-miss degraded mode rather than an outage.
  • Bookmarks don't persist / SQLite errors in logs: confirm the NFS volume mounted successfully (enable_nfs = true) and that no second instance is concurrently writing (max_instance_count should read 1).
  • Image build/pull failed: Karakeep uses a prebuilt image (ghcr.io/karakeep-app/karakeep) — a failure here is almost always a bad application_version tag rather than a Cloud Build issue, since no build runs.
  • 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 max_instance_count is pinned and the Meilisearch degraded-mode behaviour).

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, use Purge instead — it removes the deployment from RAD's records without destroying the cloud resources. This removes everything the module created — both Cloud Run services (main app and Meilisearch sidecar), Secret Manager secrets, and Artifact Registry images. Resources owned by Services_GCP (the VPC, shared NFS, registry) are managed separately and are not removed here. Note that deleting the deployment does not clear the NFS-persisted bookmark data unless the NFS volume itself is also torn down at the Services_GCP layer.

Summary​

TaskTypeOutcome
1 — DeployAutomatedModule provisions Cloud Run (main app + Meilisearch sidecar), NFS mount, and two secrets
2 — Access & verifyManualHealth check passes; create the first (admin) account and save/search a bookmark
3 — OperateManualInspect revisions, update version, manage secrets, inspect sidecar independently
4 — ObserveManualQuery Cloud Logging for both services; review Cloud Monitoring metrics
5 — TroubleshootManualDiagnose revision, NFS, sidecar, and IAM issues
6 — Tear downAutomatedDelete (Trash) removes both services and secrets

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

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