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Wallabag on Cloud Run — Lab Guide

📖 Configuration Guide

Overview​

Estimated time: 45–60 minutes

Wallabag is an open-source, self-hosted "read it later" article archiving app — save articles from a browser extension, bookmarklet, mobile app, or the REST API, and read them later in a clean, distraction-free view with full-text search and tagging. This lab takes you through the full operational lifecycle of the Wallabag on Cloud Run 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 Cloud Run module and the Google Cloud platform, not on Wallabag 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.
  • Access and verify the running service, and log in with the default administrator account.
  • Perform day-2 operations — inspect, scale, update, and manage secrets and backups.
  • Observe the service 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, Cloud SQL, Artifact Registry, and shared service accounts this module depends on).
  • A Google Cloud project with billing enabled.
  • gcloud CLI authenticated: gcloud auth login and gcloud auth application-default login.
  • 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. In the RAD platform, open Wallabag (Cloud Run), 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 provisions the Cloud Run service, a Cloud SQL (MySQL 8.0) database with its Secret Manager secrets (APP_SECRET and the database password), a generic Cloud Storage bucket, builds the custom container image, and runs the two-stage initialization chain: db-init (creates the database/user/grants) followed by wallabag-install (Wallabag's own installer, which creates the schema and seeds the default administrator account in one step). First deploys take roughly 15–25 minutes (Cloud SQL creation and the image build dominate).

  3. When it completes, discover the resources with name-agnostic filters (so the commands keep working regardless of the deployment suffix):

    SERVICE=$(gcloud run services list --project="$PROJECT" --region="$REGION" \
      --filter="metadata.name~wallabag" --format="value(metadata.name)" --limit=1)
    SERVICE_URL=$(gcloud run services describe "$SERVICE" \
      --project="$PROJECT" --region="$REGION" --format="value(status.url)")
    echo "Service: $SERVICE"
    echo "URL:     $SERVICE_URL"

Task 2 — Access & verify [Manual]​

  1. Confirm the service is healthy. Wallabag redirects an unauthenticated request to the root path to its login page — expect HTTP 302, not 200:

    curl -s -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code}\n" "$SERVICE_URL/"   # expect 302

  2. Open $SERVICE_URL in a browser. Log in with Wallabag's documented default administrator credentials — username wallabag, password wallabag — seeded by the wallabag-install init job. Change this password immediately (top-right menu → your account → change password). Self-service sign-up is disabled by default, so this is the only account until you create more from the admin UI.

  3. Save a test article to confirm end-to-end write/read against the real database: paste any article URL into the "Save a new entry" box and confirm it appears in your list with its title and content fetched. Reload the page (or, better, redeploy — see Task 3) and confirm the saved article is still there — this is the surest sign the app is actually writing to Cloud SQL and not to a throwaway local file (see the Troubleshoot section for why that distinction matters).

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

  1. Inspect the service and its revisions (each deploy creates an immutable revision; traffic shifts to the newest healthy one):

    gcloud run services describe "$SERVICE" --project="$PROJECT" --region="$REGION"
    gcloud run revisions list --service="$SERVICE" --project="$PROJECT" --region="$REGION"

  2. Scale by changing the min/max instance inputs and clicking Update on the deployment details page — the module owns the service spec, so scaling is a configuration change, not a manual gcloud edit (a manual edit would be reverted on the next apply).

  3. Update the application version by changing application_version in the RAD platform and applying it via Update; a new image builds FROM wallabag/wallabag:<version> and a new revision rolls out. wallabag-install re-runs safely against the existing schema (it is idempotent) — no manual migration step is needed.

  4. Manage secrets and backups:

    gcloud secrets list --project="$PROJECT" --filter="name~wallabag"
    gcloud run jobs list --project="$PROJECT" --region="$REGION"   # init + scheduled backup jobs

  5. Open a database session for inspection or maintenance:

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

  6. Set up the browser extension / mobile app / API access. With the admin account logged in, go to your account settings to view your API client credentials, or generate a new API client under Developer → My applications. Use $SERVICE_URL as the server address when configuring the official Firefox/Chrome extension or a mobile client (wallabag Android/iOS, or any Pocket-compatible client that supports a custom server).

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

  1. Logs — from the CLI or the Logs Explorer:

    gcloud run services logs read "$SERVICE" --project="$PROJECT" --region="$REGION" --limit=50

    Logs Explorer filter: resource.type="cloud_run_revision" AND resource.labels.service_name="<service>".

  2. Monitoring — open the Cloud Run dashboard for the service and review request count, request latency, instance count (scaling behaviour), and CPU / memory utilisation. The module can provision an uptime check; if enabled, confirm it is green under Monitoring → Uptime checks, and review 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 Wallabag releases.

  • Revision unhealthy / service won't serve: inspect the latest revision and its logs for startup errors, and confirm env vars and secrets resolved. The startup probe is TCP on port 80 (only needs nginx to bind); a 302 from the liveness probe's GET / is expected and healthy. 
    gcloud run revisions list --service="$SERVICE" --project="$PROJECT" --region="$REGION"
    gcloud run services logs read "$SERVICE" --project="$PROJECT" --region="$REGION" --limit=100
  • Articles vanish after a redeploy — the #1 thing to check on this module. This is the signature symptom of Wallabag silently installing against a local SQLite file instead of MySQL: the app boots, the health checks pass, articles save and appear to work, but everything disappears on the next container restart. This happens if SYMFONY__ENV__DATABASE_DRIVER is ever unset or overridden — it must explicitly be pdo_mysql (the shipped entrypoint.sh sets this; do not add a conflicting SYMFONY__ENV__DATABASE_DRIVER via environment_variables). See the Configuration Guide's Configuration Pitfalls section for the full explanation — there is no error message for this failure, only the vanished data.
  • Database connection errors: confirm the Cloud SQL instance is RUNNABLE, the DB password secret exists, and the db-init job completed successfully before wallabag-install ran.
  • Initialisation job failed: list executions and read the failed one's logs: 
    gcloud run jobs executions list --job="${SERVICE}-db-init" \
      --project="$PROJECT" --region="$REGION"
    gcloud run jobs executions list --job="${SERVICE}-wallabag-install" \
      --project="$PROJECT" --region="$REGION"
  • Image build failed: review Cloud Build history for the failed build's log.
  • 403 / permission errors: verify the runtime service account's IAM roles.
  • Can't log in with wallabag / wallabag: if the password was already changed by a previous operator, use gcloud sql connect (Task 3) or the install job's logs to confirm wallabag-install actually ran; a fresh deployment always seeds the default credentials on first successful install.

See the Configuration Guide's Configuration Pitfalls section for setting-specific gotchas — especially the critical SYMFONY__ENV__DATABASE_DRIVER rule above.

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

Summary​

TaskTypeOutcome
1 — DeployAutomatedModule provisions Cloud Run, Cloud SQL (MySQL 8.0), secrets, storage bucket, and runs the db-init → wallabag-install init chain
2 — Access & verifyManualHealth check returns 302 to /login; log in with default wallabag/wallabag; save a test article
3 — OperateManualInspect revisions, scale, update version, manage secrets/backups, DB access, extension/API setup
4 — ObserveManualQuery Cloud Logging; review Cloud Monitoring metrics and uptime check
5 — TroubleshootManualDiagnose revision, database, init-job, and build issues — including the silent-SQLite-fallback symptom
6 — Tear downAutomatedDelete (Trash) removes all module resources

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

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