Gotify on GKE Autopilot

Gotify is an open-source (MIT-licensed), self-hosted server for sending and receiving real-time push notifications. Applications post messages over a simple REST API and clients receive them instantly over WebSocket streams. This module deploys Gotify on GKE Autopilot on top of the App_GKE foundation, which provisions and manages the shared Google Cloud and Kubernetes infrastructure.

This guide focuses on the cloud services Gotify uses and how to explore and operate them from the Google Cloud Console and the command line. For the mechanics common to every GKE application — Workload Identity, ingress, autoscaling, CI/CD, Cloud Armor, IAP, Binary Authorization, VPC Service Controls, backups, and the deployment lifecycle — refer to the App_GKE foundation guide rather than repeating them here.

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What Gotify costs on RAD, and how that compares

Running Gotify on GKE Autopilot pod in your own Google Cloud project costs about $91.31/month in Google Cloud charges, on top of a one-off 75-credit RAD module fee charged once at deploy time. Gotify's job is small — accept a webhook, fan it out over WebSocket — but this deployment still needs a database and a file server behind it, which is most of the $91.31 above. In a RAD-managed project the module fee drops to 67.5 credits (10% lower) and the running cost is metered hourly in credits instead of billed directly by Google — see Pause it for free below for the one RAD-managed advantage a self-hosted VPS cannot match — or see the Cloud Run guide for the lower-cost option.

What you pay on RAD

	Own project	RAD-managed project
Module fee (one-off)	75 credits	67.5 credits (10% lower)
Build time	~3-6 credits per build, either way	~3-6 credits per build, either way
Google Cloud running cost	$91.31/month, billed by Google at list price	~86 credits/day, metered at list price plus RAD's margin

Default running cost in your own project

Resource	US$/month (Google list price, us-central1)
GKE Autopilot pod, 1x vCPU / 0.5 GiB	$34.29
Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL, 1 vCPU / 3.75 GB, zonal, 10 GB SSD	$51.02
Cloud NAT and networking	$5.00
Cloud Storage (add-ons, backups)	$1.00
GKE cluster management fee	shared across every GKE app in the project; $0 if this is your only cluster, else ~73
Total	$91.31

The GKE cluster management fee is excluded from the total above because it is shared across every GKE app in the project — $0 if this is the only one, otherwise roughly $73/month split across however many you run.

How it compares

• A self-managed comparison: Hetzner CPX22 (2 vCPU/4GB) runs about $24/mo, a DigitalOcean 2 vCPU/4GB Droplet is the same $24/mo, and a GCP Compute Engine e2-standard-2 (2 vCPU/8GB) is about $49/mo — any of those is enough to run Gotify and its Postgres database together in Docker Compose on one box, at a lower sticker price than RAD's managed stack.
• What that price doesn't include: backups, security patches, TLS renewal, and disk-full 2am pages, all of which RAD's managed Cloud SQL, Secret Manager and monitoring absorb for you.
• Gotify has no official hosted SaaS version of its own — it only ships as self-hosted software, so the choice is really "manage a VPS yourself" or "let RAD manage the same stack", not RAD-vs-a-subscription.

Pause it for free: delete a RAD-managed project, restore it when you need it

This is the headline advantage of a RAD-managed project, and it costs nothing while paused. Deleting a RAD-managed project unlinks its billing first, then asks Google to delete the project outright — Google's own 30-day recoverable soft delete. Unlike deleting one module, this does not tear down Cloud SQL, any VM, or the compute resource one by one: the whole project simply stops, and nothing is charged while it waits, because billing is already unlinked.

Restoring, within 30 days and only by the project's owner, asks Google to undelete the project and reattaches its billing account, then asks you to run Update on each deployment to confirm everything came back. Because nothing was individually destroyed, that Update finds the same resources already there — it is a check, not a rebuild, and an Update never charges the module fee again. This costs only a handful of credits (under US$1) in total for a typical 2-3-deployment chain.

What this needs: you must own the project (not one RAD only manages billing for), you must restore it yourself within 30 days — after that Google deletes it for good — and restoring is admitted like creating a new project, so your purchased credit balance must still clear the tier's floor (100 credits for the sandbox tier most study/demo use fits). Google says most services are fully working again within 36 hours of a restore.

One real gap: nightly backups are written to a bucket inside the project, and that bucket has Cloud Storage's soft-delete explicitly turned off, so it is very likely gone as soon as you delete the project — even though the project itself is recoverable for 30 days. If you've customised Gotify and want to keep that work, copy a backup out (to Google Drive, or a bucket outside the project) before deleting. For a default install with nothing irreplaceable in it, this does not matter.

Pay only while you use it, the other way: delete and redeploy

In your own project, or once 30 days have passed on a RAD-managed one, there is no free pause — deleting removes the resources for good, and bringing Gotify back means redeploying from scratch. That costs about 78-81 credits (the 75-credit module fee plus a build).

Deleting only saves money once Gotify would otherwise sit unused long enough to clear that redeploy cost against its own running cost — for Gotify, that's about 3 days or more. Most of that running cost is usually the database (and, where this module uses one, the shared file-server VM or GKE cluster) — those stop only once nothing else in the project uses them, so deleting this app while something else shares the project saves only its own compute share.

Keep data first: nightly backups go to a bucket inside the deployment and are deleted with it, so copy the latest backup out before deleting if you want to keep it.

Lab sessions and Managed Environments

Lab sessions, for training: a trainer runs a session for a class. Each participant gets the app in their own Google Cloud project for 15 minutes to 24 hours, within an allowance the trainer sets. Either the trainer funds every place, or each participant pays for their own. Everything is deleted when the session ends and unused credits go back to the trainer.

Managed Environments, for consultancies: a partner runs the app for a client from a ring-fenced wallet it funds, and settles with the client directly. If the wallet runs low, billing pauses and the data is kept, so nobody receives an unexpected charge. At the end the partner hands the project over and the deployments become the client's own.

Credits can be bought in more than 20 currencies, including XAF, XOF, NGN, GHS, KES and ZAR, by card, bank transfer or mobile money.

Sources (8 October 2026): Google Cloud Billing Catalog API list prices; radmodules.dev/pricing for RAD's own fees and daily-credit estimates; Google's project delete/restore documentation for the pause/restore claims.

1. Overview

Gotify runs as a single-binary Go web workload. The deployment wires together a focused set of Google Cloud services:

Capability	Google Cloud service	Notes
Compute	GKE Autopilot	Go pods, 1 vCPU / 512 MiB request by default; single replica
Database	Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL 15	Required — this module never uses Gotify's embedded SQLite
Secrets	Secret Manager	Auto-generated admin password (GOTIFY_DEFAULTUSER_PASS); database password
Container build	Cloud Build + Artifact Registry	Wraps ghcr.io/gotify/server with a DB-mapping entrypoint
Ingress	Cloud Load Balancing	External LoadBalancer, optional custom domain + managed certificate

Sensible defaults worth knowing up front:

• PostgreSQL is mandatory. database_type = "POSTGRES" is the module default; Gotify's SQLite mode is not used.
• The container listens on port 80. container_port = 80 and the entrypoint sets GOTIFY_SERVER_PORT = 80.
• A single replica is the safe default. min = max = 1. Gotify's message bus is in-process, so a client stream only receives messages delivered to the pod it is connected to. Scaling beyond one replica without an external fan-out layer drops messages for some subscribers.
• A StatefulSet with a block PVC at /app/data. Messages live in PostgreSQL, but uploaded application images and plugins are written to /app/data, so stateful_pvc_enabled = true (default) mounts a per-pod PVC there and the workload resolves to a StatefulSet. The PVC uses the standard (HDD) storage class — a few small images do not need SSD quota.
• The admin password is generated automatically and stored in Secret Manager, injected as GOTIFY_DEFAULTUSER_PASS. The initial admin (admin) is created on the first database initialisation only.
• No object storage or NFS (storage_buckets = [], enable_nfs = false) — the PVC holds the on-disk image/plugin store.
• The image is custom-built. container_image_source = "custom" wraps ghcr.io/gotify/server and maps the platform DB_* variables onto Gotify's GOTIFY_DATABASE_* (GORM) configuration; on GKE DB_HOST is 127.0.0.1 via the cloud-sql-proxy sidecar. latest pins to base 2.9.1.

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2. Google Cloud Services & How to Explore Them

All commands assume you have run gcloud container clusters get-credentials <cluster> --region <region> --project <project> and that PROJECT, REGION, and NAMESPACE are set. The namespace and other identifiers are reported in the deployment Outputs.

A. GKE Autopilot — the Gotify workload

Gotify pods are scheduled on Autopilot, which bills for the CPU/memory the pods actually request. The module keeps a single replica so the in-process message bus delivers to every connected client.

• Console: Kubernetes Engine → Workloads → select the Gotify workload for pods and events. Kubernetes Engine → Services & Ingress shows the external IP.
• CLI:

  kubectl get pods,svc -n "$NAMESPACE"
  kubectl logs -n "$NAMESPACE" deploy/<service-name> --tail=100

See App_GKE for how Autopilot, scaling, and the workload type are managed.

B. Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL 15

Gotify stores all application data (messages, applications, clients, users) in a managed Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL 15 instance. Pods reach it privately through the Cloud SQL Auth Proxy sidecar (loopback 127.0.0.1); no public IP is exposed. On first deploy an initialization Job creates the application database and role; Gotify then applies its own schema via GORM auto-migration on first startup.

• Console: SQL → select the instance for connections, backups, flags, metrics.
• CLI:

  gcloud sql instances list --project "$PROJECT"
  gcloud sql instances describe <instance-name> --project "$PROJECT"
  gcloud sql connect <instance-name> --user=<db-user> --database=<db-name> --project "$PROJECT"

The instance name, database, user, and password secret are all in the Outputs. See App_GKE for the connection model, backups, and password rotation.

C. Secret Manager

The admin password (GOTIFY_DEFAULTUSER_PASS) is generated automatically and stored in Secret Manager, materialised into the namespace via the Secret Store CSI driver. The database password is managed separately by the foundation.

• Console: Security → Secret Manager.
• CLI:

  gcloud secrets list --project "$PROJECT" --filter="name~gotify"
  gcloud secrets versions access latest --secret=<secret-name> --project "$PROJECT"

See App_GKE for the CSI integration and rotation.

D. Container build & Artifact Registry

The custom image wraps ghcr.io/gotify/server with a DB-mapping entrypoint. Cloud Build builds it and pushes to Artifact Registry; enable_image_mirroring = true mirrors the upstream base into Artifact Registry to avoid registry rate limits.

• Console: Cloud Build → History; Artifact Registry → Repositories.
• CLI:

  gcloud builds list --project "$PROJECT" --limit 5
  gcloud artifacts repositories list --project "$PROJECT"

E. Networking & ingress

By default the workload is exposed through an external Cloud Load Balancing IP. A custom domain with a Google-managed certificate can be enabled, and a static IP can be reserved so the address survives redeploys.

• Console: Network services → Load balancing; VPC network → IP addresses.
• CLI:

  kubectl get ingress,svc -n "$NAMESPACE"
  gcloud compute addresses list --project "$PROJECT"

See App_GKE for custom domains, Cloud CDN, and static IP details.

F. Cloud Logging & Monitoring

Pod stdout/stderr flow to Cloud Logging; GKE and Cloud SQL metrics flow to Cloud Monitoring, with an uptime check against /health and optional alert policies.

• Console: Logging → Logs Explorer; Monitoring → Dashboards / Alerting.
• CLI:

  gcloud logging read 'resource.type="k8s_container" AND resource.labels.namespace_name="'"$NAMESPACE"'"' \
    --project "$PROJECT" --limit 50

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3. Gotify Application Behaviour

• First-deploy database setup. An initialization Job runs create-db-and-user.sh using postgres:15-alpine. It connects through the Cloud SQL Auth Proxy and idempotently creates the application database and role and grants privileges. The job is safe to re-run.
• Schema via GORM auto-migration. Gotify creates and migrates its own tables on every startup — there is no separate migration job. Upgrading the application version applies schema changes automatically.
• The admin account is bootstrapped once. GOTIFY_DEFAULTUSER_NAME = admin and the GOTIFY_DEFAULTUSER_PASS secret create the initial administrator on the first database initialisation only. Retrieve the password from Secret Manager and change it after first login.
• Send and receive are token-authenticated. After logging in, create an application (which yields an app token) to send messages via POST /message?token=<apptoken>, and use a client token to subscribe over the WebSocket at /stream?token=<clienttoken>. Confirm health without a token:

  kubectl run curl --rm -it --image=curlimages/curl -n "$NAMESPACE" -- \
    curl -s http://<service-name>/health

• Single-replica WebSocket delivery. Because the message bus is in-process, keep max_instance_count = 1 unless you add an external fan-out layer — otherwise a message sent to one pod is not delivered to clients streaming from another.
• Health path. Startup and liveness probes target /health — the public endpoint that returns {"health":"green","database":"green"} once PostgreSQL is reachable. The default startup probe allows ~5 minutes on first boot.

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4. Configuration Variables

Variables are grouped exactly as they appear on the deployment platform. Only settings specific to or notable for Gotify are listed; every other input is inherited from App_GKE with its standard behaviour and defaults.

Group 1 — Project & Identity

Variable	Default	Description
project_id	(required)	Target Google Cloud project.
region	us-central1	Region for the workload and regional resources.

Group 2 — Deployment Environment

Variable	Default	Description
tenant_id	demo	Short suffix that makes resource names unique per environment.
support_users	[]	Emails granted project access and monitoring alerts.
resource_labels	{}	Labels applied to all resources.

Group 3 — Application Identity

Variable	Default	Description
application_name	gotify	Base name for resources. Do not change after first deploy.
application_display_name	Gotify	Human-readable name shown in the Console.
application_description	Gotify push notification server on GKE Autopilot	Workload description.
application_version	latest	Image tag; latest resolves to the pinned base 2.9.1. Pin a release in production.
deploy_application	true	Set false to provision infrastructure only.

Group 4 — Runtime & Scaling

Variable	Default	Description
container_image_source	custom	custom builds the DB-mapping wrapper image; prebuilt deploys an image URI you configure.
container_resources	{ cpu_limit="1000m", memory_limit="512Mi" }	Per-pod CPU/memory requests and limits.
container_port	80	Gotify listens on port 80.
min_instance_count	1	HPA minReplicas.
max_instance_count	1	HPA maxReplicas. Keep at 1 — the in-process message bus does not fan out across pods.
workload_type	null → StatefulSet	Resolves to a StatefulSet because the PVC is enabled.
stateful_pvc_enabled	true	Per-pod PVC for the uploaded image/plugin store; without it those files are lost on every restart.
stateful_pvc_mount_path	/app/data	Where Gotify writes images and plugins.
stateful_pvc_storage_class	standard	HDD; avoids the regional SSD quota.
timeout_seconds	300	Maximum request duration; raise for long-lived streams.
enable_cloudsql_volume	true	Cloud SQL Auth Proxy sidecar for connectivity.
enable_image_mirroring	true	Mirror ghcr.io/gotify/server into Artifact Registry.

Group 6 — Environment Variables & Secrets

Variable	Default	Description
environment_variables	{}	Extra GOTIFY_* settings. The database connection and GOTIFY_DEFAULTUSER_PASS are injected automatically — do not set them here.
secret_environment_variables	{}	Map of env var → Secret Manager secret name.
secret_propagation_delay	30	Seconds to wait after secret creation before proceeding.
secret_rotation_period	2592000s	Secret Manager rotation notification frequency.

Group 6 — GKE Backend & Cluster

Variable	Default	Description
service_type	LoadBalancer	How the Kubernetes Service is exposed.
session_affinity	None	Correct for stateless Gotify — no per-pod session is required.
namespace_name	""	Auto-generated when empty.
network_tags	[]	Node/pod network tags for firewall rules.
termination_grace_period_seconds	30	Seconds to wait after SIGTERM before SIGKILL.
enable_network_segmentation	false	Create Kubernetes NetworkPolicy resources.

Group 8 — Resource Quota

Variable	Default	Description
enable_resource_quota	false	Create a namespace ResourceQuota.
quota_memory_requests / quota_memory_limits	""	Must use binary suffixes (4Gi, 8192Mi) — bare integers are bytes and block scheduling.

Group 9 — Reliability Policies

Variable	Default	Description
enable_pod_disruption_budget	true	Protect availability during node upgrades.
pdb_min_available	1	Minimum pods available during voluntary disruptions.
enable_topology_spread	false	Distribute pods across zones.

Group 10 — Observability & Health

Variable	Default	Description
startup_probe_config	HTTP /health, 30s delay, 30 failures	Startup probe. Gotify_GKE maps this variable into the Gotify workload's own startup_probe (via Gotify_Common), so it is the value that actually gates readiness — allows ~5 minutes on first boot.
health_check_config	HTTP /health, 30s delay	Liveness probe. Likewise mapped into the workload's liveness_probe.
uptime_check_config	{ enabled=false, path="/health" }	Cloud Monitoring uptime check; disabled by default.
alert_policies	[]	Metric alert policies.

Group 11 — Jobs & Scheduled Tasks

Variable	Default	Description
initialization_jobs	[]	Leave empty to use the built-in db-init job.
cron_jobs	[]	Scheduled Kubernetes CronJobs.
additional_services	[]	Sidecar or helper services alongside Gotify.

Group 12 — CI/CD & GitHub Integration

Standard App_GKE Cloud Build / Cloud Deploy integration — see App_GKE. Key inputs: enable_cicd_trigger, github_repository_url, github_token, enable_cloud_deploy, enable_binary_authorization.

Group 13 — Filesystem (NFS)

Variable	Default	Description
enable_nfs	false	Off by default — the block PVC already persists the image/plugin store.
nfs_mount_path	/app/data	Mount path inside the container.

Group 14 — Cloud Storage & Artifact Registry

Variable	Default	Description
create_cloud_storage	true	Create GCS buckets defined in storage_buckets.
storage_buckets	[]	Empty — Gotify is stateless in this module.
gcs_volumes	[]	GCS Fuse volume mounts via the CSI driver.
manage_storage_kms_iam / enable_artifact_registry_cmek	false	CMEK options.
max_images_to_retain / delete_untagged_images / image_retention_days	(set)	Artifact Registry cleanup policy.

Group 16 — Database Backend

Variable	Default	Description
database_type	POSTGRES	Gotify uses managed PostgreSQL.
application_database_name	gotify	Database name. Immutable after first deploy.
application_database_user	gotify	Application role. Immutable after first deploy.
database_password_length	32	Generated password length (16–64).
enable_auto_password_rotation	false	Zero-downtime DB password rotation.
rotation_propagation_delay_sec	90	Seconds to wait after rotation before rolling-restarting pods.

Group 9 — Custom SQL Scripts

enable_custom_sql_scripts, custom_sql_scripts_bucket, custom_sql_scripts_path, custom_sql_scripts_use_root — run SQL from a GCS bucket after provisioning. See App_GKE.

Group 19 — Custom Domain, Static IP & Networking

Variable	Default	Description
enable_custom_domain	true	Provision Ingress for custom hostnames + managed certificate.
application_domains	[]	Hostnames to serve.
reserve_static_ip	true	Stable external IP across redeploys.

Group 5 — Identity-Aware Proxy (IAP)

Warning: Enabling IAP requires Google identity authentication for all inbound requests, including token-only send/receive API calls. Only enable IAP when those callers can also carry Google identity.

Variable	Default	Description
enable_iap	false	Require Google sign-in in front of Gotify.
iap_authorized_users / iap_authorized_groups	[]	Who may access.
iap_oauth_client_id / iap_oauth_client_secret	""	Required when IAP is enabled (sensitive).

Group 21 — Cloud Armor

Variable	Default	Description
enable_cloud_armor	false	Attach a Cloud Armor (WAF) policy to the Ingress backend.
admin_ip_ranges	[]	CIDRs allowed privileged access.
enable_cdn	false	Enable Cloud CDN on the GKE Ingress backend.

Group 22 — VPC Service Controls & Audit Logging

Variable	Default	Description
enable_vpc_sc	false	Enforce a VPC-SC perimeter (auto-discovers organization_id).
vpc_cidr_ranges / vpc_sc_dry_run	(set)	Access level CIDRs / dry-run mode.
enable_audit_logging	false	Detailed Cloud Audit Logs.

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5. Outputs

These values are returned on a successful deployment and are the quickest way to locate and explore the running resources.

Output	Description
service_name	Kubernetes Service name.
service_url	External URL of the GKE load balancer.
service_external_ip	External LoadBalancer IP.
namespace	Namespace the workload runs in.
project_id / deployment_id	Project ID / deployment suffix.
database_instance_name	Cloud SQL instance name.
database_name / database_user	Application database name / role.
database_password_secret	Secret Manager secret holding the DB password.
storage_buckets	Created Cloud Storage buckets (empty for Gotify).
container_image	Deployed image.
cicd_enabled / github_repository_url	CI/CD status and connected repo.
kubernetes_ready	Whether the cluster/workload is ready (re-run apply on a fresh inline cluster).

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6. Configuration Pitfalls & Sensible Defaults

Risk: Critical (data loss / outage / security) — High (service degraded) — Medium (cost or partial degradation) — Low (minor).

Inherited plan-time validation. This module passes its configuration through the App_GKE foundation engine, which validates values and combinations at plan time — IAP with no authorized identities, min > max replicas, enable_cloudsql_volume with database_type = "NONE", an out-of-range backup_retention_days, non-binary quota memory units. Invalid configuration fails the plan with a clear, named error before any resource is created.

Setting	Sensible value	Risk	Consequence if wrong
max_instance_count	1	Critical	Scaling beyond 1 without external fan-out drops messages for clients streaming from other pods (in-process message bus).
application_database_name / application_database_user	Set once	Critical	Immutable after first deploy; renaming recreates the DB/role and destroys all messages.
enable_backup_import	false unless restoring	Critical	Enabling without a valid backup fails the import job.
quota_memory_requests / _limits	binary units (4Gi, 8192Mi)	Critical	Bare integers are bytes and block all pod scheduling in the namespace.
container_port	80	High	Gotify listens on 80; a mismatched port fails the startup probe and the pod never becomes Ready.
enable_cloudsql_volume	true	High	The Auth Proxy sidecar is required for PostgreSQL connectivity; disabling it is blocked by a plan-time guard when database_type is set.
min_instance_count	1	High	GKE requires min ≥ 1; keeping 1 ensures the service is always reachable.
enable_iap	only when callers carry identity	High	IAP blocks token-only send/receive API calls.
GOTIFY_DEFAULTUSER_PASS (auto-generated)	Change admin password after first login	High	The bootstrap password only applies on first init; leaving it unchanged is a standing credential exposure.
enable_pod_disruption_budget	true	Medium	Disabling allows GKE to evict the pod during maintenance, dropping live streams.
backup_retention_days	7 (raise for prod)	Medium	Too short for compliance retention.

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For the foundation behaviour referenced throughout — IAM and Workload Identity, autoscaling, ingress and certificates, CI/CD, Cloud Armor, IAP, Binary Authorization, VPC-SC, backups, and image mirroring — see App_GKE. Gotify-specific application configuration shared with the Cloud Run variant is described in Gotify_Common.

Related guides

• Hands-on lab: Gotify on GKE Autopilot — deploy it step by step, with the console screens and commands at each stage.
• Gotify on Google Cloud Run — the same application on Cloud Run, for when you need the other deployment target.
• Gotify Common — Shared Application Configuration — the configuration shared by both deployment targets.