Passbolt on GKE Autopilot — Lab Guide

Overview

Estimated time: 30–60 minutes

Passbolt (Community Edition) is a free, open-source, team-oriented password manager with GPG-based encryption and per-user/group credential sharing (AGPL-3.0). This lab takes you through the full operational lifecycle of the Passbolt on GKE Autopilot module on Google Cloud: deploy it, access and verify it (including the genuinely different admin-bootstrap flow this app uses), 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 Passbolt 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, retrieve the one-time admin setup URL from pod logs, and complete registration via a Passbolt-compatible browser extension.
Perform day-2 operations — inspect, scale, update, and manage the GPG/JWT keypair volumes.
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.
A Passbolt-compatible browser extension installed (Chrome, Firefox, or Edge) — required to complete the admin account setup in Task 2. Install it from passbolt.com/download before starting.

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 Passbolt (GKE) from the Platform Modules list to start configuration, set project_id, and review the inputs. Set admin_email, admin_first_name, and admin_last_name to your real details — these seed the one and only admin account. Configure only what you need — the Configuration Guide documents every input by group, with defaults. If deploying alongside a Passbolt_CloudRun instance in the same project, set tenant_deployment_id = "gke" (and "cr" on the Cloud Run deployment) so the two variants don't collide on shared resource names. 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 password secret, two dedicated GCS-Fuse-mounted buckets (storage for the GPG server keypair, jwt for the JWT keypair), and runs the 2-stage initialization job chain (db-init → admin-bootstrap). First deploys typically take roughly 15–25 minutes. Unlike Cloud Run's execute_on_apply semantics, on GKE the Jobs' pods are scheduled immediately regardless of that setting; correctness of the ordering comes from admin-bootstrap's depends_on_jobs = ["db-init"], not from Terraform waiting.

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

Task 2 — Access & verify [Manual]

Passbolt's admin-account setup is genuinely different from almost every other application in this catalog: there is no server-side admin password, and no first-visit web setup wizard. The admin-bootstrap init job prints a one-time setup URL to its pod logs, which you open in a Passbolt-compatible browser extension — the extension then generates your GPG keypair and master password locally, and registers them with the server via that URL.

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. Passbolt exposes a public, unauthenticated status endpoint:

curl -s "http://${EXTERNAL_IP}/healthcheck/status.json"
# expect: {"header":{"status":"success",...},"body":"OK"}

Retrieve the one-time setup URL from the admin-bootstrap job's pod logs. The job printed it to stdout when it ran cake passbolt register_user (run without the -q/quiet flag specifically so this URL is visible):
```
kubectl get jobs -n "$NS"
kubectl logs -n "$NS" job/<admin-bootstrap-job-name> | grep '/setup/start/'
```
You should see a line containing a URL of the form:
```
https://<your-service-host>/setup/start/<user-id>/<token>
```
If nothing matches, the job may still be running (kubectl get jobs -n "$NS" shows completion status), or the pod may have already been garbage-collected — check kubectl get pods -n "$NS" -a | grep admin-bootstrap and, if it's gone, re-run the job (Task 5 covers this).
Install the Passbolt browser extension (Chrome, Firefox, or Edge) from passbolt.com/download if you haven't already.
Open the setup URL from step 3 in the browser where the extension is installed. The extension walks you through:
- Generating a new GPG keypair locally (this is your personal key, distinct from the server's own GPG keypair generated in Task 1).
- Choosing a master password (this never leaves your browser in plaintext).
- Registering your public key with the Passbolt server.
Once setup completes, you are logged in as the admin user you configured in admin_email/admin_first_name/admin_last_name. Confirm you can see the empty password list — there is nothing to see yet, but a working session confirms the full chain (server GPG key, JWT key, schema, admin account, your personal GPG key) is functioning.

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

Inspect the workload:

kubectl get deploy,pods -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).
Update the application version by changing application_version in the RAD platform and applying it via Update; a new image builds and a rolling update replaces the pod, and the db-init/admin-bootstrap init jobs re-run (both are idempotent — an existing schema and admin account are left untouched).

Inspect the GPG/JWT keypair volumes (do not delete or empty these — see Task 5 for the consequence):

gsutil ls -p "$PROJECT" | grep passbolt
gsutil ls gs://<storage-bucket-name>/   # expect serverkey.asc, serverkey_private.asc
gsutil ls gs://<jwt-bucket-name>/       # expect jwt.key, jwt.pem (or similar)

Open a database session for inspection or maintenance:

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

Manage users, groups, and folders — Passbolt-specific day-2 operations performed in the web UI (or via its REST API/CLI once you have a session) rather than via Terraform; these are Passbolt application data, not infrastructure. Invite additional team members from the admin UI — each new user goes through the same browser-extension setup flow as Task 2.

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 and restart counts. The module can provision an uptime check (when enabled); review Monitoring → Uptime checks.

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 Passbolt releases.

Pod not Ready / CrashLoopBackOff: inspect events and logs. The container-level startup probe targets GET /healthcheck/status.json with a generous failure threshold to accommodate first-boot latency.
```
kubectl describe pod -n "$NS" <pod>          # Events section shows scheduling/probe/mount errors
kubectl logs -n "$NS" <pod> --previous       # logs from the crashed container
```
admin-bootstrap job fails with an Internal Error / 500 on register_user: this is the exact failure mode the job is specifically built to avoid by replicating the vendor's own GPG-key-generation/schema-install sequence first — if it still fails, check its pod logs for which step failed:
```
kubectl get jobs -n "$NS"
kubectl logs -n "$NS" job/<admin-bootstrap-job-name>
```
Confirm db-init completed successfully first (admin-bootstrap depends on it via depends_on_jobs) and that the storage/jwt GCS-Fuse volumes are actually mounted with the uid=33/gid=33 options — an EACCES error in the logs during GPG key generation points straight at a missing or incorrect mount option.
Setup URL never appears in logs: confirm admin-bootstrap actually completed (not just started). If the job pod was garbage-collected or the job failed partway, its idempotent GPG/JWT/schema steps are safe to re-run — delete the completed/failed Job object and let the next apply recreate it, or trigger it manually depending on your cluster's Job semantics.
Database connection errors: confirm the Cloud SQL instance is RUNNABLE and the cloud-sql-proxy sidecar is healthy. On GKE the pod connects over loopback TCP (127.0.0.1), not a Unix socket — check the pod's injected DATASOURCES_DEFAULT_HOST value if connections fail.
Lost the GPG/JWT keypair volumes: if the storage or jwt GCS bucket is deleted or emptied, every credential Passbolt has encrypted server-side and every issued JWT session is unrecoverable — the server generates a brand-new keypair on next boot, which cannot decrypt data encrypted under the old one. There is no Terraform-side recovery for this; it is the same severity as losing a password manager's own master key. Treat these buckets with at least the same care as the Cloud SQL instance.
Image pull errors: confirm the image exists in Artifact Registry (or is reachable from Docker Hub, if mirroring is disabled) and the node service account can pull it.
Pending pod / no external IP: check kubectl describe pod events for resource or quota issues, and confirm the LoadBalancer Service has an assigned IP.

See the Configuration Guide's Configuration Pitfalls section for setting-specific gotchas, including the GCS Fuse uid=33/gid=33 mount options that are load-bearing for GPG key generation on GKE.

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, the storage/jwt GCS buckets (and the GPG/JWT keypairs within them), 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), the GPG/JWT GCS buckets, and runs the `db-init` → `admin-bootstrap` chain
2 — Access & verify	Manual	Connect to the cluster; health check passes on `/healthcheck/status.json`; retrieve the one-time setup URL from pod logs and complete registration via a browser extension
3 — Operate	Manual	Inspect workload, scale, update version, inspect the keypair volumes, DB access, manage users/groups
4 — Observe	Manual	Query Cloud Logging; review Cloud Monitoring metrics and uptime check
5 — Troubleshoot	Manual	Diagnose pod, admin-bootstrap, database, GCS Fuse permission, and keypair-loss 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​