Monica on GKE Autopilot — Lab Guide

Overview

Estimated time: 45–90 minutes

Monica is an open-source personal relationship management (PRM) application — a "personal CRM" for organising how you stay in touch with friends, family, and contacts. This lab takes you through the full operational lifecycle of the Monica 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 Monica 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.
Perform day-2 operations — inspect, scale, update, and manage secrets and 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, Cloud SQL, 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 Monica (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 the workload into the GKE Autopilot cluster, provisions a Cloud SQL (MySQL 8.0) database with its Secret Manager secrets (the Laravel APP_KEY and the database password), a Cloud Storage monica-uploads bucket plus a default data bucket, and an NFS volume shared across pods for Laravel's storage/ directory. No image is built — the workload pulls the official prebuilt monica:<version> image — and a one-shot database-initialisation job runs. First deploys take roughly 15–25 minutes (Cloud SQL creation dominates).

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

Task 2 — Access & verify [Manual]

Confirm the workload is running and find its external address:

kubectl get pods,svc -n "$NS"
EXTERNAL_IP=$(kubectl get svc -n "$NS" \
  -o jsonpath='{.items[?(@.spec.type=="LoadBalancer")].status.loadBalancer.ingress[0].ip}')
echo "External IP: $EXTERNAL_IP"

Confirm the service is healthy. The startup probe is TCP on / (passes as soon as Apache binds the port); the liveness probe is HTTP GET /:
```
curl -s -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code}\n" "http://${EXTERNAL_IP}/"   # expect 200
```
Allow a generous window on first request after pod creation — Apache boot plus the entrypoint's php artisan migrate --force both run before the page serves.
Open http://${EXTERNAL_IP} in a browser. Monica has no default credentials — an unauthenticated visitor is redirected to the registration/setup page. Register the first account (use admin@techequity.cloud for RAD deployments); it becomes the administrator. Once the external IP or a custom domain is settled, set APP_URL to that address via environment_variables and apply via Update so absolute links and redirects resolve correctly.

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

Inspect the workload — deployment, pods, and persistent volumes:

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

Scale by changing the min/max instance inputs and clicking Update on the deployment details page — the module owns the workload spec, so scaling is a configuration change, not a manual kubectl scale (a manual edit would be reverted on the next apply). GKE has no scale-to-zero, so min_instance_count defaults to 1; a single replica suits a personal CRM.
Update the application version by changing the version input in the RAD platform and applying it via Update; a new pod template pulls the new monica:<version> tag. Because the app is NFS-backed, the rollout uses the Recreate strategy (the old pod terminates before the new one starts) to avoid two pods contending on the same volume/database during the switch.
Manage secrets, storage, and jobs:
```
kubectl get secrets -n "$NS"
gcloud secrets list --project="$PROJECT" --filter="name~monica"
kubectl get jobs -n "$NS"          # db-init job
```
Never rotate the APP_KEY secret after first boot — it is a Laravel encryption key, and rotating it permanently corrupts every encrypted database field and invalidates all sessions.

Open a database session for inspection or maintenance:

INSTANCE=$(gcloud sql instances list --project="$PROJECT" --format="value(name)" --limit=1)
gcloud sql connect "$INSTANCE" --user=monica --project="$PROJECT"

Inspect uploaded files (contact photos/documents live under Laravel's storage/, shared across pods via NFS by default and mirrored to the monica-uploads bucket):
```
gcloud storage ls gs://<uploads-bucket>/
```

Task 4 — Observe: Logging & Monitoring [Manual]

Logs — from kubectl or the Logs Explorer:
```
kubectl logs -n "$NS" deploy/"$(kubectl get deploy -n "$NS" -o jsonpath='{.items[0].metadata.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, restart counts, and request metrics. The module can provision an uptime check (when enabled); review Monitoring → Uptime checks and 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 Monica releases.

Pod not Ready / CrashLoopBackOff: inspect events and logs. The startup probe is TCP on / (passes as soon as Apache binds the port); the liveness probe is HTTP GET / with a generous delay for the first-boot migration.
```
kubectl describe pod -n "$NS" <pod>          # Events section shows scheduling/probe/mount errors
kubectl logs -n "$NS" <pod> --previous       # logs from the crashed container
```
Database connection errors: confirm the Cloud SQL instance is RUNNABLE and the db-init job completed. Monica reaches MySQL through the Cloud SQL Auth Proxy sidecar on 127.0.0.1:3306 (enable_cloudsql_volume = true); a different DB_HOST cannot reach the database on GKE.

Initialisation job failed: inspect the job and its pod logs:

kubectl get jobs -n "$NS"
kubectl logs -n "$NS" job/<job-name>

Rollout wedged on an update: because the app is NFS-backed, updates use the Recreate strategy — a rollout that still hangs is more likely a probe or migration failure on the new pod than a volume contention issue; check kubectl describe deploy and the new pod's logs.
Pending pod / no external IP: check kubectl describe pod events for resource or quota issues, and confirm the LoadBalancer Service has an assigned IP.
Image pull errors: confirm the monica:<version> tag exists upstream and the node service account can pull it (this module uses the official prebuilt image, not a custom build).

See the Configuration Guide's Configuration Pitfalls 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 once set).

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 workload and namespace, Cloud SQL database, Secret Manager secrets, GCS buckets, and Artifact Registry images. Resources owned by Services_GCP (the VPC, GKE cluster, shared Cloud SQL, registry) are managed separately and are not removed here.

Summary

Task	Type	Outcome
1 — Deploy	Automated	Module deploys the GKE workload, Cloud SQL (MySQL 8.0), secrets, storage buckets, NFS, and runs DB init
2 — Access & verify	Manual	Connect to the cluster; health check passes; create the initial admin account in the UI
3 — Operate	Manual	Inspect workload, scale, update version (Recreate rollout), manage secrets/storage, DB access, inspect uploads
4 — Observe	Manual	Query Cloud Logging; review Cloud Monitoring metrics and uptime check
5 — Troubleshoot	Manual	Diagnose pod, database, init-job, rollout, and image-pull 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​