Mixpost on Cloud Run — Lab Guide

📖 Configuration Guide

Overview

Estimated time: 45–90 minutes

Mixpost is an open-source, self-hosted social media scheduling and management platform — a Buffer/Hootsuite alternative for composing, scheduling, publishing, and analysing posts across multiple social accounts from one dashboard. This lab takes you through the full operational lifecycle of the Mixpost 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 Mixpost 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.
• Understand the cold-start trade-off for scheduled post publishing and how to restore continuous operation.
• 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 (provides the VPC, Cloud SQL, NFS/Redis host, Artifact Registry, and shared service accounts this module depends on). You do not need to deploy this yourself first — the platform automatically detects whether it already exists in the target project and provisions it before this module if not (see Task 1).
• 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.
• Bringing your own project? Before the first deploy into it, the deployment confirmation dialog asks you to prove you control it (Get verification code, run the commands it shows as a project Owner, then Verify) and to give the RAD deployment service account the Owner role. A project RAD creates for you needs neither.
• Advanced mode for later changes. The create form asks only for the first page of inputs (and, in a project RAD creates for you, little more than the tenant name and region). Every other input in the Configuration Guide — including the scaling and version inputs in the Day-2 tasks — is changed afterwards with Update on the deployment's page after ticking Enable advanced mode, which needs a credit balance that covers the update's estimated build cost (updates never carry a module fee). On a lab environment only an administrator can use Advanced mode.
• 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. In the RAD platform, open Solutions → Solution Catalog → RAD modules, then open Mixpost (Cloud Run) from the Platform Modules list, choose Configuration Form under How would you like to configure this deployment? (the form opens on the Conversational Assistant if you hold purchased credits or are a partner or administrator), set project_id, and review the inputs. Configure only what you need — the Configuration Guide documents every input by group, with defaults. Click Deploy Module, review the estimated cost in the Deployment Confirmation dialog when it appears and click Submit (if the dialog then adds a confirmation step, such as verifying a project you bring, complete it and click Confirm), which opens the deployment status page with real-time logs.

2. The platform provisions the Cloud Run service (the prebuilt inovector/mixpost image — no custom build), a Cloud SQL (MySQL 8.0) database with its Secret Manager secrets (the Laravel APP_KEY and the database password), a Cloud Storage bucket, mirrors the prebuilt image into Artifact Registry, and runs a one-shot db-init job that creates the application database and user. First deploys take roughly 15–30 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="$REGION" \
     --filter="metadata.name~mixpost" --format="value(metadata.name)" --limit=1)
   SERVICE_URL=$(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 reachable. The startup probe is TCP on port 80, and the liveness probe is HTTP on /, which Mixpost/nginx answers with 200:

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

2. Open $SERVICE_URL in a browser and sign in. Mixpost's admin account is seeded by the image itself and is not configurable through this module — the mixpost_admin_email input is declared but not currently injected into the running container. Use the image's documented default first-login credentials (admin@example.com / changeme) and change the password immediately after first login.

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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. Understand the scheduled-publishing trade-off. This module defaults to min_instance_count = 0 and cpu_always_allocated = false (cold-start, request-based billing). Mixpost's queue worker and Laravel scheduler run inside the same container under supervisord, so they only execute while an instance happens to be warm or serving a request — scheduled social posts do not reliably publish on their own out of the box, because Cloud Run does not wire up any Cloud Scheduler job automatically. To make scheduled publishing reliable, either:

   • point a Cloud Scheduler job at a cron/health endpoint on $SERVICE_URL every minute to keep an instance warm and trigger schedule:run (use the generic cron_jobs foundation variable or an external scheduler), or
   • set cpu_always_allocated = true and min_instance_count >= 1 on the module and apply via Update, to keep the scheduler running continuously (mirrors the repository's always-on convention for background-work apps).

4. Update the application version by changing the version input in the RAD platform and applying it via Update; a new image is pulled and a new revision rolls out — there is no separate migration job, since the image runs php artisan migrate --force on every boot.

5. Manage secrets and backups:

   gcloud secrets list --project="$PROJECT" --filter="name~mixpost"
   gcloud run jobs list --project="$PROJECT" --region="$REGION"   # db-init + any scheduled backup jobs

6. Open a database session for inspection or maintenance:

   INSTANCE=$(gcloud sql instances list --project="$PROJECT" --format="value(name)" --limit=1)
   # Role and database are tenant-prefixed (e.g. mixpostdemo426161cf) — not the bare app name.
   DB_USER=$(gcloud sql users list --instance="$INSTANCE" --project="$PROJECT" \
     --format="value(name)" --filter="name~^mixpost" --limit=1)
   gcloud sql connect "$INSTANCE" --user="$DB_USER" --project="$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 can provision an uptime check (disabled by default — uptime_check_config.enabled = false); enable it for a production deployment and confirm it is green under Monitoring → Uptime checks.

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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 Mixpost releases.

• Revision unhealthy / service won't serve: inspect the latest revision and its logs for startup errors, and confirm env vars and secrets resolved. The startup probe is TCP on port 80 (90s initial delay, high failure threshold for first boot); the liveness probe is HTTP on /.

  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 and the db-init job completed. This module defaults enable_cloudsql_volume = false (TCP/private-IP, not the Auth Proxy socket) — if the app cannot reach the database, check the deployed revision's env to see whether a socket or TCP path is actually in effect.

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

• Scheduled posts not publishing: this is expected under the cold-start default — see Task 3, step 3 for the fix (Cloud Scheduler cron hit, or cpu_always_allocated = true + min_instance_count >= 1).
• Login credentials unknown / "admin account not configured": the admin account is seeded by the image itself, not by this module's mixpost_admin_email variable — use the image's documented default credentials.
• 403 / permission errors: verify the runtime service account's IAM roles.

See the Configuration Guide's Configuration Pitfalls & Sensible Defaults section for setting-specific gotchas (including the critical rule never to rotate APP_KEY after first boot, and the immutability of application_database_name / application_database_user).

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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 (from the same Delete dialog) — it removes the deployment from RAD's records without destroying the cloud resources (it makes RAD forget the deployment). This removes everything the module created — the Cloud Run service, Cloud SQL database, Secret Manager secrets, GCS buckets, and Artifact Registry images. Resources owned by Services_GCP (the VPC, shared Cloud SQL, NFS/Redis host, 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), secrets, storage bucket, and runs db-init
2 — Access & verify	Manual	Health check passes; sign in with the image's default admin credentials and change the password
3 — Operate	Manual	Inspect revisions, scale, update version, manage the scheduled-publishing trade-off, secrets/backups, DB access
4 — Observe	Manual	Query Cloud Logging; review Cloud Monitoring metrics and (optional) uptime check
5 — Troubleshoot	Manual	Diagnose revision, database, scheduling, and IAM issues
6 — Tear down	Automated	Delete (Trash) removes all module resources