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Rocket.Chat on GKE Autopilot — Lab Guide

📖 Configuration Guide

Overview​

Estimated time: 45–90 minutes

Rocket.Chat is an open-source, self-hosted team-communication platform — a Slack/Teams alternative with channels, direct messages, threads, and voice/video. This lab takes you through the full operational lifecycle of the Rocket.Chat on GKE Autopilot module on Google Cloud: deploy it, complete the first-run setup wizard, 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 Rocket.Chat 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 complete the setup wizard (admin + organization).
  • Perform day-2 operations — inspect the StatefulSet/PVC, update, and manage backups.
  • 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, 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 RocketChat (GKE) from the Platform Modules list to start configuration, set project_id, and review the inputs. Confirm stateful_pvc_enabled = true — MongoDB requires a real block filesystem; gcsfuse corrupts WiredTiger. Configure only what else 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 builds a custom container image — the official rocketchat/rocket.chat image with a single-node MongoDB 6.0 replica set (rs0) baked in — provisions a StatefulSet with a Persistent Disk PVC mounted at /data/db, and deploys the workload into the GKE Autopilot cluster. There is no Cloud SQL instance; MongoDB is embedded. The image build dominates first-deploy time, roughly 15–25 minutes.

  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"

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

Task 2 — Access & complete the setup wizard [Manual]​

  1. Confirm the workload is running and the PVC is bound:

    kubectl get statefulset,pods,pvc,svc -n "$NS"

  2. The Service is ClusterIP by default. Reach the UI with a port-forward (or enable a custom domain + Gateway for permanent external access):

    kubectl port-forward -n "$NS" svc/"$(kubectl get svc -n "$NS" -o jsonpath='{.items[0].metadata.name}')" 3000:3000 &
    curl -s "http://localhost:3000/api/info"   # expect {"version":"6.12.1","success":true,...}

    If it is not yet ready, confirm the embedded MongoDB reached PRIMARY on boot:

    kubectl logs -n "$NS" statefulset/"$(kubectl get statefulset -n "$NS" -o jsonpath='{.items[0].metadata.name}')" \
      | grep -i "replica set rs0 is PRIMARY"

  3. Open http://localhost:3000 in a browser. On first visit Rocket.Chat launches the 4-step setup wizard — no admin credential is pre-seeded:

    • Step 1 — Admin Info: full name, username, admin email (use admin@techequity.cloud for RAD deployments), password.
    • Step 2 — Organization Info: organization name, type, industry, size, country.
    • Step 3 — Register Server: Register with Rocket.Chat Cloud or Keep standalone.
    • Step 4 — Complete: you land in the admin workspace.

  4. (Optional) When you expose Rocket.Chat on a custom domain, set ROOT_URL to that hostname via environment_variables and apply an Update.

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

  1. Inspect the workload — StatefulSet, pod, and PVC:

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

  2. Do not scale beyond one replica. The PVC is ReadWriteOnce and the embedded MongoDB is a single writer — min_instance_count and max_instance_count are both 1 by design. A second replica cannot attach the disk. Scale vertically (more CPU/memory, a larger or premium-rwo PVC) by changing the inputs and clicking Update.

  3. Update the application version by changing the version input in the RAD platform and applying it via Update; a new image builds and the single pod is recreated (brief downtime while the PVC re-attaches). Rocket.Chat runs its own migrations on start.

  4. Manage the API token, storage, and jobs:

    kubectl get secrets -n "$NS"
    gcloud secrets list --project="$PROJECT" --filter="name~api-key"   # when enable_api_key = true
    kubectl get cronjobs -n "$NS"                                       # scheduled mongodump backups

  5. Back up MongoDB by exec-ing a mongodump inside the pod against the replica set and copying the dump to the storage bucket (see the Configuration Guide's cron_jobs).

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

  1. Logs — both Rocket.Chat and the embedded mongod log to stdout:

    kubectl logs -n "$NS" statefulset/"$(kubectl get statefulset -n "$NS" -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 PVC usage. The module can provision an uptime check against /api/info (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 Rocket.Chat releases.

  • Pod not Ready / CrashLoopBackOff: inspect events and logs. The startup probe targets /api/info; the pod is not Ready until the embedded replica set is PRIMARY. 
    kubectl describe pod -n "$NS" <pod>          # Events: scheduling / probe / mount errors
    kubectl logs -n "$NS" <pod> --previous       # logs from the crashed container
  • /api/info never returns 200: grep for replica set rs0 is PRIMARY. If MongoDB never reaches PRIMARY, check the PVC is bound and mounted at /data/db and the pod is not OOM-killed (raise memory_limit).
  • Data corruption after a restart: confirm stateful_pvc_enabled = true and that /data/db is on the PVC — a gcsfuse mount corrupts WiredTiger and is the classic cause of a broken data set.
  • Pending pod / PVC unbound: check kubectl describe pvc and kubectl describe pod events for storage-class or quota issues.
  • Image pull errors: confirm the image exists in Artifact Registry and the node service account can pull it (MongoDB 6.0 must install from the bullseye repo at build time).

See the Configuration Guide's Configuration Pitfalls section for setting-specific gotchas (including keeping stateful_pvc_enabled = true, stateful_pvc_mount_path = "/data/db", and never scaling beyond one replica).

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 StatefulSet and namespace, the Persistent Disk PVC holding the MongoDB data, the Cloud Storage bucket, any Secret Manager API token, and Artifact Registry images. Resources owned by Services_GCP (the VPC, GKE cluster, registry) are managed separately and are not removed here.

Summary​

TaskTypeOutcome
1 — DeployAutomatedModule builds the image (Rocket.Chat + embedded MongoDB), provisions a StatefulSet + block PVC, and deploys to GKE
2 — Access & setup wizardManualConnect to the cluster; health check passes; complete the 4-step wizard (admin + organization)
3 — OperateManualInspect StatefulSet/PVC, update version, manage API token/backups; never scale out
4 — ObserveManualQuery Cloud Logging; review Cloud Monitoring metrics and uptime check
5 — TroubleshootManualDiagnose pod, replica-set, PVC/storage, 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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