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Tandoor on GKE Autopilot — Lab Guide

📖 Configuration Guide

Overview​

Estimated time: 45–90 minutes

Tandoor Recipes is an open-source, self-hosted recipe manager and meal planner with URL-import recipe scraping. This lab takes you through the full operational lifecycle of the Tandoor 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 Tandoor 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, access the running workload, and retrieve the generated superuser credential.
  • 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]​

  1. Click Deploy in the RAD platform top navigation, open Tandoor (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.

  2. The platform deploys the workload into the GKE Autopilot cluster, provisions a Cloud SQL (PostgreSQL 15) database with its Secret Manager secrets (SECRET_KEY, DJANGO_SUPERUSER_PASSWORD, and the database password), a Cloud Storage data bucket, and runs two one-shot jobs: db-init (creates the database and user) and create-superuser (bootstraps the initial admin account). First deploys take roughly 20–35 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"

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

Task 2 — Access & verify [Manual]​

  1. 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"

  2. Confirm the service is healthy. Tandoor has no dedicated unauthenticated health endpoint, so check Django's public login page:

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

  3. Retrieve the generated superuser credential — Tandoor has no self-registration flow and no fixed default credential:

    SECRET_NAME=$(gcloud secrets list --project="$PROJECT" \
      --filter="name~tandoor-superuser-password" --format="value(name)" --limit=1)
    gcloud secrets versions access latest --secret="$SECRET_NAME" --project="$PROJECT"

  4. Open http://${EXTERNAL_IP}/accounts/login/ in a browser and log in with username admin (or your configured admin_username) and the password retrieved above.

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 "$NS"
    kubectl describe deploy -n "$NS"

  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). Tandoor has no background worker, so scaling beyond one replica needs no special coordination.

  3. Update the application version by changing the version input in the RAD platform and applying it via Update; a rolling update replaces the pods. Tandoor publishes a genuine latest tag upstream.

  4. Manage secrets, storage, and jobs:

    kubectl get secrets -n "$NS"
    gcloud secrets list --project="$PROJECT" --filter="name~tandoor"
    kubectl get jobs -n "$NS"          # db-init and create-superuser

  5. Open a database session for inspection or maintenance:

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

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

  1. 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>".

  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 Tandoor releases.

  • Pod not Ready / CrashLoopBackOff: inspect events and logs. The startup probe targets /accounts/login/ and requires Postgres connectivity plus applied migrations to return 200; a connection failure to PostgreSQL will keep the pod from becoming Ready. 
    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, the DB password secret materialised into the namespace, and the db-init job completed.
  • Can't log in / no credential known: retrieve DJANGO_SUPERUSER_PASSWORD from Secret Manager (Task 2, step 3) — there is no fixed fallback credential.
  • create-superuser job failed: inspect the job and its pod logs — a common cause is the job racing db-init (GKE's execute_on_apply only gates whether Terraform waits, not whether the pod is scheduled before db-init finishes; the job retries up to twice): 
    kubectl get jobs -n "$NS"
    kubectl logs -n "$NS" job/<create-superuser-job-name>
  • 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 (Tandoor is prebuilt by default, so this only applies if container_image_source was overridden to custom).

See the Configuration Guide's Configuration Pitfalls section for setting-specific gotchas (including the critical rule never to rotate SECRET_KEY after first boot).

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​

TaskTypeOutcome
1 — DeployAutomatedModule deploys the GKE workload, Cloud SQL (PostgreSQL 15), secrets, storage bucket, and runs db-init + create-superuser
2 — Access & verifyManualConnect to the cluster; health check passes; retrieve the generated superuser credential and log in
3 — OperateManualInspect workload, scale, update version, manage secrets/storage, DB access
4 — ObserveManualQuery Cloud Logging; review Cloud Monitoring metrics and uptime check
5 — TroubleshootManualDiagnose pod, database, init-job, 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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