Kimai on Google Cloud Run

Kimai is a free, open-source time-tracking application (Symfony/PHP) used by freelancers and agencies for billable-hours tracking, timesheets, and reporting that feeds into invoicing. This module deploys Kimai on Cloud Run v2 on top of the App_CloudRun foundation, which provisions and manages the shared Google Cloud infrastructure.

This guide focuses on the cloud services Kimai uses and how to explore and operate them from the Google Cloud Console and the command line. For the mechanics common to every Cloud Run application — service identity, ingress and load balancing, scaling and concurrency, CI/CD, Cloud Armor, IAP, Binary Authorization, VPC Service Controls, backups, and the deployment lifecycle — refer to the App_CloudRun foundation guide rather than repeating them here.

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1. Overview

Kimai runs as a Symfony/PHP container (the official kimai/kimai2:apache image, wrapped in a thin custom build) on Cloud Run v2. The deployment wires together a focused set of Google Cloud services:

Capability	Google Cloud service	Notes
Compute	Cloud Run v2	Symfony/PHP service, 1 vCPU / 2 GiB by default, serverless autoscaling; scale-to-zero by default
Database	Cloud SQL for MySQL 8.0	Required — Kimai_Common fixes the engine; PostgreSQL is not supported
Object storage	Cloud Storage	A storage bucket, GCS-FUSE-mounted at /opt/kimai/var/data for uploaded invoice logos/templates and plugin data
Secrets	Secret Manager	Auto-generated APP_SECRET (Symfony signing key) and ADMINPASS (admin password); database password
Ingress	Cloud Run URL / Cloud Load Balancing	Default run.app URL; optional external HTTPS load balancer + custom domain

Sensible defaults worth knowing up front:

• MySQL 8.0 is mandatory. The database engine is fixed by Kimai_Common; selecting any other engine breaks the deployment.
• Custom wrapper image is required, not optional. container_image_source = "custom" builds a thin image FROM kimai/kimai2 whose entrypoint composes Kimai's single DATABASE_URL connection string at container startup from Foundation-injected secret values — Cloud Run cannot do this at plan time (see §3).
• container_port = 8001, not port 80 — confirmed via local docker run testing and live deployment. This is the :apache image variant's actual listening port.
• enable_cloudsql_volume = false. Cloud Run connects to Cloud SQL over the private IP directly (TCP), not the Auth Proxy Unix socket. The GKE variant instead runs an Auth Proxy sidecar.
• Two Secret Manager secrets, generated once. APP_SECRET (Symfony CSRF/session signing key) and ADMINPASS (initial super-admin password) — both re-injected from Secret Manager on every container start, so no persistent volume is needed just to keep them stable.
• Scale-to-zero is enabled by default (min_instance_count = 0, max_instance_count = 1). Cold starts add latency to the first request after idle; set min_instance_count = 1 to avoid this.
• enable_nfs defaults true but is functionally unused. It mounts Cloud Filestore NFS at /var/lib/kimai, but the real persistent storage path is the GCS-FUSE-mounted storage bucket at /opt/kimai/var/data. Nothing writes to the NFS mount. Safe to disable.
• No separate migrate job. kimai:install (schema creation and migrations) runs on every container boot, idempotently, as part of the vendor's own entrypoint chain — only a single db-init job is needed to create the database and user beforehand.

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2. Google Cloud Services & How to Explore Them

All commands assume PROJECT and REGION are set. Service and resource names are reported in the deployment Outputs.

A. Cloud Run — the Kimai service

Kimai runs as a Cloud Run v2 service that autoscales by request load between the minimum and maximum instance counts. Each deployment creates an immutable revision; traffic can be split across revisions for safe rollouts.

• Console: Cloud Run → select the service for revisions, traffic, logs, and metrics.
• CLI:

  gcloud run services list --project "$PROJECT" --region "$REGION"
  gcloud run services describe <service-name> --project "$PROJECT" --region "$REGION"
  gcloud run revisions list --service <service-name> --project "$PROJECT" --region "$REGION"

See App_CloudRun for scaling, concurrency, execution environment, and traffic splitting.

B. Cloud SQL for MySQL 8.0

Kimai stores all application data (projects, activities, timesheets, users, invoices) in a managed Cloud SQL for MySQL 8.0 instance. The service connects over the instance's private IP via TCP (not the Auth Proxy socket — enable_cloudsql_volume defaults false for this module). On first deploy, a db-init job creates the application database and user; kimai:install then creates the schema on the container's own first boot.

• 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 in the Outputs. See App_CloudRun for the connection model, backups, and password rotation.

C. Cloud Storage

Two GCS buckets can exist for this deployment: a storage bucket provisioned by Kimai_Common and GCS-FUSE-mounted at /opt/kimai/var/data (uploaded invoice logos/templates, plugin data), and a separate, generic Foundation-level bucket (storage_buckets, defaulting to a bucket named data) that Kimai does not read or write unless you wire it up explicitly.

• Console: Cloud Storage → Buckets.
• CLI:

  gcloud storage buckets list --project "$PROJECT"

D. Secret Manager

Two secrets are generated automatically and stored in Secret Manager: APP_SECRET (Symfony CSRF/session signing key) and ADMINPASS (the initial super-admin account password). The database password is managed separately by the foundation.

• Console: Security → Secret Manager.
• CLI:

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

See App_CloudRun for injection and rotation details.

E. Networking & ingress

The service is reachable at its run.app URL by default. An external HTTPS load balancer with a custom domain, Cloud CDN, and Cloud Armor can be layered on.

• Console: Cloud Run (service URL); Network services → Load balancing.
• CLI:

  gcloud run services describe <service-name> --region "$REGION" --format='value(status.url)'
  gcloud compute addresses list --project "$PROJECT"

See App_CloudRun.

F. Cloud Logging & Monitoring

Container logs flow to Cloud Logging; Cloud Run and Cloud SQL metrics flow to Cloud Monitoring, with optional uptime checks and alert policies.

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

  gcloud run services logs read <service-name> --project "$PROJECT" --region "$REGION" --limit 50

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3. Kimai Application Behaviour

• A single DATABASE_URL composed entirely at runtime, not passed through Terraform. Kimai's Doctrine DBAL layer reads one connection string, DATABASE_URL=mysql://user:pass@host:port/db?charset=utf8mb4&serverVersion=8.0, not discrete DB_* variables. Because the database password is a runtime secret unknown at plan time, and Cloud Run does not interpolate $(VAR) references the way Kubernetes does, Kimai_Common builds a thin custom wrapper image FROM kimai/kimai2 whose entrypoint.sh composes DATABASE_URL at container start from the Foundation-injected DB_USER/DB_NAME/DB_PASSWORD/DB_IP env vars — URL-encoding the password with php -r 'echo rawurlencode(...)' (the image has no python3; it is a PHP image) — before handing off unmodified to the vendor's own docker-php-entrypoint /entrypoint.sh.
• DB_IP, not the standard DB_HOST. The wrapper reads the host from $DB_IP (aliased via db_host_env_var_name = "DB_IP"), which resolves to the raw Cloud SQL private IP on Cloud Run — a plain host with no colons, safe to place directly in a mysql://... URL authority. The standard DB_HOST can instead be a Cloud SQL Unix socket-directory path containing colons, which would break URL parsing if used the same way.
• Verified locally before ever touching the cloud. The password URL-encoding step and the vendor's own DB-wait preflight check were both confirmed by building the wrapper image and running it locally against a real MySQL container with a password containing special characters (@:/?), catching and fixing issues before the first cloud deploy attempt.
• Health check behaviour. Both the startup and liveness probes target GET /en/login (Kimai's login page), which returns 200 once the application is ready. / also works generically (Kimai issues a 302 redirect from the root path), but /en/login is the precise, verified target actually configured.

  curl -s -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code}\n" "$SERVICE_URL/en/login"   # expect 200

• Admin bootstrap runs on every boot, idempotently. The vendor's own entrypoint runs kimai:user:create admin "$ADMINMAIL" ROLE_SUPER_ADMIN "$ADMINPASS" on every container start whenever ADMINPASS is set — a no-op once the account exists. The username is always admin, hardcoded by the vendor image regardless of admin_email's value.
• Inspect job execution:

  gcloud run jobs list --project "$PROJECT" --region "$REGION"
  gcloud run jobs executions list --job <job-name> --project "$PROJECT" --region "$REGION"

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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 Kimai are listed; every other input is inherited from App_CloudRun with its standard behaviour.

Group 1 — Project & Identity

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

Group 2 — Deployment Environment

Variable	Default	Description
tenant_deployment_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	kimai	Base name for resources. Do not change after first deploy.
display_name	Kimai	Human-readable name shown in the Console.
description	Kimai IT asset management on Cloud Run	Leftover generic text in the shipped default (inherited from an earlier clone source — Kimai is time tracking, not asset management); cosmetic only, does not affect deployment.
application_version	latest	Image tag driving the kimai/kimai2 build. "latest" maps to the maintained :apache rolling tag; any other value maps to "<version>-apache".
admin_email	admin@example.com	Super-admin account email, injected as ADMINMAIL. The account username is always admin, hardcoded by the vendor entrypoint.
php_memory_limit	512M	PHP memory_limit (the vendor entrypoint reads the lowercase memory_limit env var directly).
enable_gcs_storage_volume	true	GCS-FUSE-mount the storage bucket at /opt/kimai/var/data.

Group 4 — Runtime & Scaling

Variable	Default	Description
deploy_application	true	Set false to provision infrastructure only.
container_image_source	custom	Builds the DATABASE_URL-composing wrapper image via Cloud Build — required, not optional, for this module.
cpu_limit	1000m	CPU per instance.
memory_limit	2Gi	Memory per instance.
min_instance_count	0	0 enables scale-to-zero.
max_instance_count	1	Autoscaling upper bound.
container_port	8001	Kimai's :apache image variant listens on 8001, confirmed via local testing and live deployment.
execution_environment	gen2	Gen2 required for GCS Fuse mounts.
enable_cloudsql_volume	false	Cloud Run connects over the Cloud SQL private IP directly via TCP instead of the Auth Proxy socket.
enable_image_mirroring	true	Mirror the image into Artifact Registry.
container_protocol	http1	HTTP/1.1.

Group 5 — Access & Ingress Control

Variable	Default	Description
ingress_settings	all	Public ingress by default.
vpc_egress_setting	PRIVATE_RANGES_ONLY	Route only RFC 1918 traffic via VPC.
enable_iap	false	Require Google sign-in.
iap_authorized_users / iap_authorized_groups	[]	Who may access through IAP.

Group 6 — Environment Variables & Secrets

Variable	Default	Description
environment_variables	{}	Extra non-secret settings. Do not set DATABASE_URL here — it is composed at runtime by the wrapper entrypoint.
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 7 — Backup & Restore

Variable	Default	Description
backup_schedule	0 2 * * *	Automated backup cron (UTC).
backup_retention_days	7	Retention; raise for production.
enable_backup_import / backup_source / backup_uri / backup_format	restore options	Restore from a backup on deploy.

Group 8 — CI/CD & Binary Authorization

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

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_CloudRun.

Group 10 — Load Balancer, CDN & Image Retention

Variable	Default	Description
enable_cloud_armor	false	Provision Global HTTPS LB + Cloud Armor WAF.
application_domains	[]	Custom domain names for the HTTPS LB.
enable_cdn	false	Enable Cloud CDN on the HTTPS LB backend.
max_images_to_retain / delete_untagged_images / image_retention_days	(set)	Artifact Registry cleanup policy.

Group 11 — Storage & Filesystem

Variable	Default	Description
create_cloud_storage	true	Create the generic data GCS bucket. Not read or written by Kimai.
enable_nfs	true	Functionally unused — mounted at /var/lib/kimai, but Kimai's real persistent storage is the GCS-FUSE-mounted storage bucket at /opt/kimai/var/data. Safe to disable.
gcs_volumes	[]	Additional GCS Fuse volume mounts (requires gen2), merged with the storage bucket mount.
manage_storage_kms_iam / enable_artifact_registry_cmek	false	CMEK options.

Group 12 — Database Backend

Variable	Default	Description
database_type	MYSQL_8_0	Fixed by Kimai_Common.
db_name / db_user	kimai	Tenant-prefixed at deploy time. Immutable after first deploy.
database_password_length	32	Generated password length (16–64).
db_host_env_var_name	DB_IP	Aliases the DB host so the wrapper's DATABASE_URL composition reads a plain, colon-free host — the standard DB_HOST can be a socket-directory path on Cloud Run, which would break URL parsing.
db_user_env_var_name / db_name_env_var_name / db_port_env_var_name / db_password_env_var_name	"" (all four)	Unused by Kimai — the wrapper reads the standard DB_USER/DB_NAME/DB_PASSWORD directly and hardcodes port 3306.

Group 13 — Jobs & Scheduled Tasks

Variable	Default	Description
initialization_jobs	[]	Leave empty to use the built-in single db-init job. There is no separate migrate job — kimai:install runs on every container boot, idempotently.
cron_jobs	[]	No platform-scheduled recurring tasks by default.

Group 14 — Observability & Health

Variable	Default	Description
startup_probe	GET /en/login, 30s delay, 20 retries	Generous — covers the DB-wait preflight and kimai:install on first boot.
liveness_probe	GET /en/login, 60s delay, 3 retries	Kimai's login page, 200 once ready.
uptime_check_config	{ enabled = false }	Cloud Monitoring uptime check.
alert_policies	[]	Metric alert policies.

Group 21 — Redis

Variable	Default	Description
enable_redis	false	Kimai has no built-in Redis integration used by this module — its default cache backend is the local filesystem.
redis_host	""	Redis endpoint.
redis_port	6379	Redis port.

Group 22 — VPC Service Controls & Audit Logging

Variable	Default	Description
enable_vpc_sc	false	Enforce a VPC-SC perimeter (requires organization_id).
enable_audit_logging	false	Detailed Cloud Audit Logs.

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5. Outputs

Returned on a successful deployment — the quickest way to locate and explore the running resources.

Output	Description
service_name	Cloud Run service name.
service_url	Default run.app URL of the service.
service_location	Region the service runs in.
load_balancer_ip / load_balancer_url	External HTTPS load balancer IP / URL (when enabled).
database_instance_name	Cloud SQL instance name.
database_name / database_user	Application database name / user.
database_password_secret	Secret Manager secret holding the DB password.
database_host / database_port	DB endpoint (private IP) / port.
storage_buckets	Created Cloud Storage buckets.
network_name / network_exists / regions	VPC network, presence, regions.
container_image / container_registry	Deployed image and Artifact Registry repo.
monitoring_enabled / monitoring_notification_channels / uptime_check_names	Monitoring status, channels, uptime checks.
initialization_jobs	Name of the setup job (db-init).
deployment_id / tenant_id / resource_prefix	Naming identifiers.
project_id / project_number	Project identifiers.
cicd_enabled / github_repository_url / cicd_configuration	CI/CD status and details.
artifact_registry_repository / cloudbuild_trigger_name / cloudbuild_trigger_id	Registry and build trigger.
vpc_sc_enabled / vpc_sc_perimeter_name / vpc_sc_dry_run_mode	VPC-SC status.
audit_logging_enabled / artifact_registry_cmek_enabled	Audit logging and CMEK status.

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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_CloudRun foundation engine, which validates values and combinations at plan time. Invalid configuration fails the plan with a clear, named error before any resource is created, so most mistakes below are caught up front rather than at apply or runtime.

Setting	Sensible value	Risk	Consequence if wrong
container_image_source	custom	Critical	Switching to prebuilt deploys the stock kimai/kimai2 image with no wrapper entrypoint — DATABASE_URL is never composed, so the app cannot reach MySQL at all (Kimai has no other way to receive a working connection string on Cloud Run).
db_host_env_var_name	DB_IP	Critical	The wrapper composes DATABASE_URL from this specific alias. Clearing it, or renaming it away from what entrypoint.sh expects, leaves the wrapper reading an empty host and the app cannot connect.
container_port	8001	Critical	The :apache image variant listens on 8001, not 80 — pointing the platform at the wrong port makes the service unreachable even though the container is healthy.
db_name / db_user	Set once	Critical	Immutable after first deploy; renaming recreates the DB/user and destroys all timesheets, projects, and invoices.
APP_SECRET (auto-generated)	Never hand-edit in Secret Manager after first boot	High	Kimai uses this as a Symfony security-signing key; changing it invalidates CSRF tokens and active sessions.
Default administrator account (username always admin, password in the ADMINPASS secret)	Retrieve the generated password from Secret Manager and log in promptly	High	Unlike some catalogue apps, the admin password here is a real, per-deployment generated secret — not a public well-known default — but it is still worth confirming who has read access to the secret.
enable_backup_import	false unless restoring	Critical	Enabling without a valid backup_uri fails the import job.
min_instance_count	1 for production	Medium	Scale-to-zero (0) adds cold-start latency to the first request after idle.
enable_nfs	false unless needed for another purpose	Low / cost	Defaults true and provisions a Filestore share that Kimai never uses — a needless recurring cost; real persistence is the GCS-FUSE-mounted storage bucket.
enable_cloud_armor	enable for production	Medium	The service is publicly reachable without WAF protection by default.

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For the foundation behaviour referenced throughout — service identity, scaling and concurrency, ingress and load balancing, CI/CD, Cloud Armor, IAP, Binary Authorization, VPC-SC, backups, and image mirroring — see App_CloudRun. Kimai-specific application configuration shared with the GKE variant is described in Kimai_Common.