WriteFreely on Cloud Run — Lab Guide

Overview

Estimated time: 45–90 minutes

WriteFreely is an open-source, minimalist, federated blogging platform written in Go — a lightweight Medium alternative for publishing clean, distraction-free writing. This lab takes you through the full operational lifecycle of the WriteFreely 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 WriteFreely 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 blog.
Perform day-2 operations — inspect, scale, update, and manage secrets and the database.
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]

In the RAD platform, open WriteFreely (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.
The platform provisions the Cloud Run service, a Cloud SQL (MySQL 8.0) database with its Secret Manager secrets (three AES-256 keys — cookies-auth, cookies-enc, email-key — plus the database password), a dedicated writefreely-uploads Cloud Storage bucket, builds the custom config-gen container image, and runs a one-shot database-initialisation job. First deploys take roughly 15–25 minutes (Cloud SQL creation dominates).

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="$REGION" \
  --filter="metadata.name~writefreely" --format="value(metadata.name)" --limit=1)
SERVICE_URL=$(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]

Confirm the service is up. WriteFreely has no dedicated /health endpoint — the liveness probe is an HTTP GET / that expects a 200 from the home page:
```
curl -s -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code}\n" "$SERVICE_URL/"   # expect 200
```
Open $SERVICE_URL in a browser to confirm the blog's home page renders. Registration is closed by default (open_registration = false) and no admin account is seeded, so create the first account now:
- Temporarily set WF_OPEN_REGISTRATION = "true" in environment_variables and apply via Update, register through the UI, then set it back to "false" and apply again; or
- Run WriteFreely's built-in admin creation command against the running container (see Task 3, step 5, for how to reach a shell/exec equivalent via a one-off job, since Cloud Run has no persistent exec into a running revision).
Do not rotate the AES-256 keys (cookies-auth, cookies-enc, email-key) after this first boot — doing so logs out every user and makes previously encrypted email addresses undecryptable.

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

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"

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). WriteFreely defaults to min_instance_count = 0 (scale-to-zero) and max_instance_count = 1; set min_instance_count = 1 if the occasional cold-start delay after idle is undesirable.
Update the application version by changing the version input in the RAD platform and applying it via Update; a new image builds and a new revision rolls out. Pin a specific release rather than leaving application_version = "latest" in production, so rebuilds stay reproducible.

Manage secrets:

gcloud secrets list --project="$PROJECT" \
  --filter="name~cookies-auth OR name~cookies-enc OR name~email-key"
gcloud run jobs list --project="$PROJECT" --region="$REGION"   # db-init job

Open a database session for inspection or maintenance:

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

Task 4 — Observe: Logging & Monitoring [Manual]

Logs — from the CLI or the Logs Explorer. On first boot look for the entrypoint's progress lines (WriteFreely: rendered config.ini …, … seeded stable encryption keys …, … starting server …):
```
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>".
Monitoring — open the Cloud Run dashboard for the service and review request count, request latency (P50/P95/P99), instance count (scaling behaviour), and CPU / memory utilisation. The module also provisions an uptime check (when the endpoint is publicly reachable); 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 WriteFreely 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 (Ready as soon as port 8080 is bound); the liveness probe is HTTP GET /.
```
gcloud run revisions list --service="$SERVICE" --project="$PROJECT" --region="$REGION"
gcloud run services logs read "$SERVICE" --project="$PROJECT" --region="$REGION" --limit=100
```
Database connection errors: confirm the Cloud SQL instance is RUNNABLE, the DB password secret exists, and the initialisation job completed successfully. WriteFreely on Cloud Run connects over private-IP TCP (enable_cloudsql_volume = false), not a socket — do not confuse this with the GKE variant's Auth Proxy sidecar.

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"

Image build failed: review Cloud Build history for the failed build's log — container_image_source must stay custom since the config-gen entrypoint is not present in any prebuilt upstream image.
403 / permission errors: verify the runtime service account's IAM roles.

See the Configuration Guide's Configuration Pitfalls section for setting-specific gotchas (including the critical rule never to rotate the AES-256 keys after first boot, and why db_name/db_user are immutable after first deploy).

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

Task	Type	Outcome
1 — Deploy	Automated	Module provisions Cloud Run, Cloud SQL (MySQL 8.0), 3 AES-256 key secrets, storage bucket, and runs DB init
2 — Access & verify	Manual	Home page returns 200; create the initial account via temporary open registration
3 — Operate	Manual	Inspect revisions, scale, update version, manage secrets, DB access
4 — Observe	Manual	Query Cloud Logging; review Cloud Monitoring metrics and uptime check
5 — Troubleshoot	Manual	Diagnose revision, database, init-job, build, and IAM 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​