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Rallly on GKE Autopilot — Lab Guide

📖 Configuration Guide

Overview​

Estimated time: 45–90 minutes

Rallly is an open-source, self-hosted meeting-scheduling and group-poll application — a privacy-friendly alternative to Doodle — built with Next.js and Prisma. This lab takes you through the full operational lifecycle of the Rallly 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 Rallly 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 SMTP settings.
  • 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]​

  1. Click Deploy in the RAD platform top navigation, open Rallly (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. Unlike the Cloud Run variant, smtp_host defaults to empty here — set smtp_host, smtp_user, and smtp_password now if you want email login working from the first boot. Review the estimated cost (if credits are enabled) and click Deploy, which opens the deployment status page with real-time logs.

  2. The platform deploys the workload into the GKE Autopilot cluster, provisions a Cloud SQL (PostgreSQL 15) database with its Secret Manager secrets (SECRET_PASSWORD, NEXTAUTH_SECRET, an optional SMTP_PWD, and the database password), builds the container image, and runs a one-shot database-initialisation job that creates the empty database and role. First deploys take roughly 15–25 minutes (Cloud SQL creation dominates).

  3. 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"

    NAMESPACE=$(kubectl get ns -o name | grep rallly | head -1 | cut -d/ -f2)
    echo "Cluster: $CLUSTER   Namespace: $NAMESPACE"
    kubectl get all -n "$NAMESPACE"

Task 2 — Access & verify [Manual]​

  1. Confirm the workload is running and find its external address:

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

  2. Confirm the pod is fully ready. Rallly's own status endpoint (also the configured startup/liveness probe path on GKE) returns 200 once the app has finished the first-boot Prisma migration and confirmed its database connection:

    curl -s -o /dev/null -w '%{http_code}\n' "http://${EXTERNAL_IP}/api/status"   # expect 200

  3. Open http://${EXTERNAL_IP} in a browser. Rallly's login is passwordless and email-based — there is no pre-seeded admin account. Enter your email on the sign-in page; Rallly emails a verification link/code through the configured SMTP relay. If nothing arrives, confirm SMTP is actually configured (Task 3, step 4) before assuming the deployment is broken.

  4. Once you know the external IP (or a custom domain), set base_url to it and apply via Update so invite and login links resolve to the address users actually visit.

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

  1. Inspect the workload — deployment, pods, and the horizontal autoscaler:

    kubectl get deploy,pods,hpa -n "$NAMESPACE"
    kubectl describe deploy -n "$NAMESPACE"

  2. 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). Rallly keeps all state in PostgreSQL (Deployment workload type, no PVC), so pods scale horizontally without any shared filesystem.

  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 rolling update replaces the pods. Rallly's own ./docker-start.sh runs prisma migrate deploy on every boot, so schema migrations apply automatically — no separate migration step is required.

  4. Manage secrets, SMTP, and jobs:

    kubectl get secrets -n "$NAMESPACE"
    gcloud secrets list --project="$PROJECT" --filter="name~rallly"
    kubectl exec -n "$NAMESPACE" deploy/"$(kubectl get deploy -n "$NAMESPACE" -o jsonpath='{.items[0].metadata.name}')" \
      -- env | grep -E 'SMTP_|NEXT_PUBLIC_BASE_URL'
    kubectl get jobs -n "$NAMESPACE"          # db-init and any scheduled jobs

    Never rotate SECRET_PASSWORD or NEXTAUTH_SECRET outside of a planned maintenance window — see Task 5.

  5. Open a database session for inspection or maintenance:

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

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

  1. Logs — from kubectl or the Logs Explorer:

    kubectl logs -n "$NAMESPACE" deploy/"$(kubectl get deploy -n "$NAMESPACE" -o jsonpath='{.items[0].metadata.name}')" --tail=50

    Logs Explorer filter: resource.type="k8s_container" AND resource.labels.namespace_name="<namespace>".

  2. 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 Rallly releases.

  • Pod not Ready / CrashLoopBackOff: inspect events and logs. Both the startup and liveness probes target /api/status; the startup probe allows a 30-period, 10-failure window (roughly 5 minutes) to cover the first-boot Prisma migration before the liveness probe (60s initial delay) starts checking. 
    kubectl describe pod -n "$NAMESPACE" <pod>          # Events section shows scheduling/probe/mount errors
    kubectl logs -n "$NAMESPACE" <pod> --previous       # logs from the crashed container
  • Users cannot sign in: Rallly's login is passwordless and email-based. Confirm smtp_host / smtp_user / smtp_password are set — unlike the Cloud Run variant, smtp_host is empty by default here, so email is off until explicitly configured.
  • Database connection errors: confirm the Cloud SQL instance is RUNNABLE, the DB password secret materialised into the namespace, and the init job completed.
  • Initialisation job failed: inspect the job and its pod logs: 
    kubectl get jobs -n "$NAMESPACE"
    kubectl logs -n "$NAMESPACE" job/<job-name>
  • Invite/login links point at the wrong host: set base_url to the external LoadBalancer IP or custom domain — otherwise NEXT_PUBLIC_BASE_URL / NEXTAUTH_URL are left unset.
  • 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 image exists in Artifact Registry and the node service account can pull it.

See the Configuration Guide's Configuration Pitfalls section for setting-specific gotchas (including the critical rule never to rotate SECRET_PASSWORD or NEXTAUTH_SECRET after first boot, and the db_name/db_user immutability rule).

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, 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​

TaskTypeOutcome
1 — DeployAutomatedModule deploys the GKE workload, Cloud SQL (PostgreSQL 15), secrets, and runs DB init
2 — Access & verifyManualConnect to the cluster; status endpoint returns 200; sign in via emailed verification link
3 — OperateManualInspect workload, scale, update version, manage secrets/SMTP, DB access
4 — ObserveManualQuery Cloud Logging; review Cloud Monitoring metrics and uptime check
5 — TroubleshootManualDiagnose pod, database, init-job, SMTP, scheduling, and image-pull issues
6 — Tear downAutomatedDelete (Trash) removes all module resources

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

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