Homebox on GKE Autopilot
Homebox is an open-source, self-hosted home inventory and organization system with a Go REST API backend (Echo-style, Ent ORM) and a Vue 3/Nuxt frontend served embedded from the same binary — track items, attach photos, and organize by location. This module deploys Homebox 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 Homebox 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.
What Homebox costs on RAD, and how that compares
Running Homebox 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 40-credit RAD module fee charged once at deploy time. Homebox is a small home-inventory app with a modest Postgres database behind it — there is no commercial hosted SaaS for this exact open-source project to name. In a RAD-managed project the module fee drops to 36 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) | 40 credits | 36 credits (10% lower) |
| Build time | ~3-6 credits per build, either way | ~3-6 credits per build, either way |
| Google Cloud running cost | $91.31/month, billed by Google at list price | ~85 credits/day, metered at list price plus RAD's margin |
Default running cost in your own project
| Resource | US$/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 — more than this 1 vCPU/0.5 GiB app needs on its own, but the smallest widely-quoted reference point; a cheaper shared-vCPU class would also run it comfortably.
- Most of the running cost above is the dedicated Postgres instance, which a self-managed box would also need to run (and back up) itself.
- The usual trade-off applies: cheaper in cash terms on a VPS, managed backups and patching on RAD.
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 Homebox 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 Homebox back means redeploying from scratch. That costs about 43-46 credits (the 40-credit module fee plus a build).
Deleting only saves money once Homebox would otherwise sit unused long enough to clear that redeploy cost against its own running cost — for Homebox, that's about 2 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
Homebox runs as a single Go binary (API + embedded frontend) — one pod, no sidecars beyond the Cloud SQL Auth Proxy. The deployment wires together a small, focused set of Google Cloud services:
| Capability | Google Cloud service | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Compute | GKE Autopilot | Go/Echo pod, 1 vCPU / 512 MiB by default |
| Database | Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL 15 | Homebox reads discrete HBOX_DATABASE_* env vars, not a constructed DSN |
| Object storage | Cloud Storage | A data bucket is created for item photos/attachments and auto-mounted at /data |
| Cache & queue | none | Homebox has no Redis or queue dependency |
| Secrets | Secret Manager | Database password plus HBOX_AUTH_API_KEY_PEPPER (a real, app-consumed secret) |
| Ingress | Cloud Load Balancing | External LoadBalancer, optional custom domain + managed certificate |
Sensible defaults worth knowing up front:
- PostgreSQL is the standardized engine.
Homebox_Commonfixesdatabase_type = "POSTGRES_15"and setsHBOX_DATABASE_DRIVER=postgresexplicitly. - No custom container build. The official prebuilt image
(
ghcr.io/sysadminsmedia/homebox) is used directly. - Open self-registration, not a default admin account. Homebox does not
ship a hardcoded credential: the first person to submit the "Register"
form on a fresh instance becomes the initial admin user. See the
Common guide for detail. Operators should set
HBOX_OPTIONS_ALLOW_REGISTRATION=falseafter completing registration. workload_type = "Deployment", notStatefulSet. Homebox keeps no local state beyond what's already in Cloud SQL — no PVC, no NFS mount required.- Item photos are persisted by default.
Homebox_Commondeclares agcs_volumesentry mounting thedataGCS bucket at/data, so uploaded item photos and attachments survive a pod restart. If you enable the block PVC instead (stateful_pvc_enabled = true, mounted at/data), the GCS FUSE mount is dropped automatically so the two never collide.
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.
A. GKE Autopilot — the Homebox workload
- CLI:
kubectl get pods,svc -n "$NAMESPACE"
kubectl logs -n "$NAMESPACE" deploy/<service-name> --tail=100
B. Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL 15
Pods reach the database privately through the cloud-sql-proxy sidecar over
127.0.0.1.
- CLI:
gcloud sql instances list --project "$PROJECT"
gcloud sql connect <instance-name> --user=<db-user> --database=<db-name> --project "$PROJECT"
C. Cloud Storage
- CLI:
gcloud storage buckets list --project "$PROJECT" --filter="name~homebox"
D. Secret Manager
- CLI:
gcloud secrets list --project "$PROJECT" --filter="name~homebox"
gcloud secrets versions access latest --secret=<secret-name> --project "$PROJECT"
E. Networking & ingress
- CLI:
kubectl get svc -n "$NAMESPACE" -o wide
F. Cloud Logging & Monitoring
- CLI:
kubectl logs -n "$NAMESPACE" deploy/<service-name> --tail=100 -f
3. Homebox Application Behaviour
- First-deploy database setup. An initialization Job runs
create-db-and-user.sh, idempotently creating the application role and database. - Schema migrations on start. Homebox's Ent ORM applies its own internal migrations automatically on every pod start.
- Open self-registration — no default admin credential. The first
visitor to complete the "Register" form becomes the admin. There is no
credential to retrieve, reset, or rotate — set
HBOX_OPTIONS_ALLOW_REGISTRATION=falseonce the admin account exists to close public signups. - Health path. Startup and liveness probes target
/api/v1/status— Homebox's real, unauthenticated status endpoint. - Inspect job execution:
kubectl get jobs -n "$NAMESPACE"
kubectl logs -n "$NAMESPACE" job/<job-name>
4. Configuration Variables
Variables are grouped exactly as they appear on the deployment platform. Only settings specific to or notable for Homebox are listed; every other input is inherited from App_GKE with its standard behaviour.
Group 3 — Application Identity
| Variable | Default | Description |
|---|---|---|
application_name | homebox | Base name for resources. |
application_version | latest | Homebox publishes a genuine latest tag. |
Group 4 — Runtime & Scaling
| Variable | Default | Description |
|---|---|---|
container_image_source | prebuilt | No custom build needed. |
container_port | 7745 | Homebox's native default port. |
min_instance_count / max_instance_count | 0 / 1 | HPA scaling bounds. |
Group 11 — Storage & Filesystem
| Variable | Default | Description |
|---|---|---|
storage_buckets | one data bucket | Created and auto-mounted at /data. |
stateful_pvc_enabled | null (auto, disabled) | Optional. Setting true mounts a block PVC at /data and drops the GCS FUSE mount there; the default bucket mount already persists photos. |
Group 12 (16) — Database Backend
| Variable | Default | Description |
|---|---|---|
database_type | POSTGRES_15 | Fixed by Homebox_Common. |
db_host_env_var_name | HBOX_DATABASE_HOST | Aliases the platform DB_HOST onto Homebox's expected name. |
db_user_env_var_name | HBOX_DATABASE_USERNAME | Aliases DB_USER. |
db_password_env_var_name | HBOX_DATABASE_PASSWORD | Aliases DB_PASSWORD. |
db_name_env_var_name | HBOX_DATABASE_DATABASE | Aliases DB_NAME. |
db_port_env_var_name | HBOX_DATABASE_PORT | Aliases DB_PORT. |
Group 14 — Observability & Health
| Variable | Default | Description |
|---|---|---|
startup_probe_config / health_check_config | HTTP /api/v1/status | Probes target Homebox's real status endpoint. |
5. Outputs
| Output | Description |
|---|---|
service_name / service_url / service_external_ip | Kubernetes Service identity and address. |
database_instance_name / database_name / database_user / database_host / database_port | Cloud SQL connection details. |
storage_buckets | The data bucket for item photos and attachments. |
kubernetes_ready | Whether the workload reached Ready state. |
6. Configuration Pitfalls & Sensible Defaults
Risk: Critical (data loss / outage / security) — High (service degraded) — Medium (cost or partial degradation) — Low (minor).
| Setting | Sensible value | Risk | Consequence if wrong |
|---|---|---|---|
application_database_name / application_database_user | Set once | Critical | Immutable after first deploy; renaming recreates the DB/user and destroys all data. |
container_image_source | prebuilt (default) | High | "custom" triggers an unnecessary Cloud Build with no Dockerfile in this module. |
| First registration | Complete promptly after deploy | Medium | The first person to register on a fresh, publicly reachable instance becomes the admin — until you register and set HBOX_OPTIONS_ALLOW_REGISTRATION=false, anyone who discovers the URL can claim the admin account. |
gcs_volumes for item photos | Leave empty (use the module's own /data mount) | High | Homebox_Common already mounts the data bucket at /data. Supplying a non-empty gcs_volumes list replaces that mount entirely — if the replacement does not also cover /data, uploaded item photos and attachments fall back to the pod's ephemeral filesystem and do not survive a restart. |
db_*_env_var_name variables | Leave at their Homebox-specific defaults | Critical | Changing/clearing these breaks Homebox's Postgres connection — it reads HBOX_DATABASE_*, not DB_*. |
HBOX_DATABASE_SSL_MODE | disable (already set by this module) | Critical | On GKE, DB_HOST resolves to 127.0.0.1 (the cloud-sql-proxy sidecar), which terminates TLS itself and serves plaintext on loopback. Homebox's Postgres client defaults HBOX_DATABASE_SSL_MODE to require and panics on boot (tls error: server refused TLS connection) unless told the local connection is unencrypted. Homebox_GKE sets this via module_env_vars — do not clear it. Not needed on Cloud Run, which connects over a Unix socket (no TLS negotiation applies there regardless of this setting). |
For the foundation behaviour referenced throughout — Workload Identity, ingress, autoscaling, CI/CD, Cloud Armor, IAP, Binary Authorization, VPC-SC, backups, and image mirroring — see App_GKE. Homebox-specific application configuration shared with the Cloud Run variant is described in Homebox_Common.
Related guides
- Hands-on lab: Homebox on GKE Autopilot — deploy it step by step, with the console screens and commands at each stage.
- Homebox on Google Cloud Run — the same application on Cloud Run, for when you need the other deployment target.
- Homebox Common — Shared Application Configuration — the configuration shared by both deployment targets.
- Deployed alongside Grocy on GKE Autopilot, Mealie on GKE Autopilot, Wallos on GKE Autopilot, LubeLogger on GKE Autopilot in the Home & Life Management solution.
Need RAD to do something it does not do yet? Request it on the roadmap, or vote on what is already there.