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.
What Kimai costs on RAD, and how that compares
Kimai on RAD's Cloud Run module costs about US$70 a month in a Google Cloud project you own, plus a one-off 75-credit (US$7.50) module fee. Kimai itself is free and open source (AGPL), so this is the cost of the infrastructure behind your own instance, not a licence. If you only need it occasionally — a single client engagement, a seasonal contract — a RAD-managed project can be deleted and restored within 30 days for a handful of credits, so that US$70 becomes a few dollars a month instead. See Pause it for free, below.
What you pay on RAD
| In a Google Cloud project you own | In a project RAD manages for you | |
|---|---|---|
| Module fee, once per deployment | 75 credits (US$7.50 at the top-up price) | 67.5 credits (10% lower) |
| Build time | A few credits per build | The same |
| Google Cloud running cost | Billed by Google to your own billing account, about US$70 a month for the default configuration (table below) | Metered hourly in credits; RAD publishes 26 credits a day, about 780 a month (about US$78 at the top-up price, US$62 at the Scale plan's rate) |
| Who owns what | You own the project and its billing; RAD deploys and updates it | RAD owns the project, with guardrails, quotas and budget alerts; you get console access, and a minimum purchased balance is held in reserve |
10 credits cost US$1 on a one-off top-up, and less on a monthly plan. In a project RAD manages, the database, file server and network are shared by every application in the project, so a second application does not add a second database.
Default running cost in your own project (us-central1, Google list prices):
| Resource (module default) | Per month |
|---|---|
| Cloud Run, 1x vCPU / 2 GiB (scaleToZero) | US$13.16 |
| Cloud SQL for MySQL, 1 vCPU / 3.75 GB, zonal, 10 GB SSD | US$51.02 |
| Cloud NAT and networking | US$5.00 |
| Cloud Storage (add-ons, backups) | US$1.00 |
| Total | about US$70 |
How it compares
- Kimai's own project sells hosted Kimai Cloud at kimai.org/en/pricing: the Standard plan is €3.99/user/month (€2.99 billed annually) and the Professional plan (SSO, custom domain, daily backups) is €4.99/user/month (€3.99 annually). For a five-person team that is roughly €20–30/month — cheaper in cash than RAD's figure above, because Kimai Cloud's price scales with users rather than carrying a fixed database-plus-compute floor.
- RAD's cost doesn't grow per user. The gap narrows, and then reverses, as a freelancer's team grows past roughly ten to fifteen people, and you keep your own Cloud SQL instance rather than Kimai's team holding the timesheet data.
- A bare VPS (Hetzner CPX22 or a DigitalOcean 2 vCPU/4 GB Droplet, about US$24/month) is cheaper again in cash, with the usual trade: you run MySQL, backups and patches yourself.
- See the GKE guide for a deployment that stays available for a larger team.
Pause it for free: delete a RAD-managed project, restore it when you need it
If Kimai runs in a project RAD manages for you, you have a second option that goes well beyond scaling to zero: delete the whole project, and restore it within 30 days for close to nothing. This suits Kimai you only need occasionally — a course project, a demo, a short-lived evaluation — far better than running it continuously.
- How it works. Deleting a RAD-managed project unlinks its billing first, then asks Google to delete the project. Google does not remove the project immediately: it keeps it, recoverable, for 30 days. Because billing is already unlinked, nothing is charged while it waits. Unlike deleting one module, this does not tear down Cloud SQL or Kimai's own compute one by one — the whole project, and everything in it, simply stops.
- Restoring costs a handful of credits, not a rebuild. Within 30 days, the project's owner can restore it. RAD 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. For Kimai behind a small Services_GCP and Project_GCP, that is a handful of credits (under US$1) in total, against the 80 credits a full redeploy costs.
- What this needs. You must own the project (not a bring-your-own one RAD only manages billing for), and you restore it yourself within the 30 days — after that, Google deletes it for good. Restoring is admitted like creating a new project: your purchased credit balance must still clear the tier's floor (100 credits for the sandbox tier most study and demo use fits). Google says most services are fully working again within 36 hours of a restore.
- One real gap: the backup bucket does not survive. Kimai's nightly backups are written to a bucket inside the project, and that bucket is not protected by Cloud Storage's soft-delete, 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 Kimai and want to keep that work, copy a backup out (to Google Drive, or a bucket outside the project) before you delete, the same as the redeploy workflow below. For a default installation with nothing irreplaceable in it, this does not matter.
Pay only while you use it, the other way: delete and redeploy
Cloud Run already scales to zero between requests. The option above only applies to a RAD-managed project; in your own project, or once the 30-day window has passed, the way to stop paying is to delete the deployment and deploy it again when you need it.
- What a redeploy costs. The module fee again plus the builds: about 80 credits (US$8.00), because RAD recreates the project and shared services before Kimai. Deleting saves money only once Kimai would otherwise sit unused for about four days or more, both in your own project (about US$2.34 a day) and in a RAD-managed one (26 credits a day).
- Delete everything Kimai uses. Most of the running cost is usually the database. It stops only when nothing else in the project uses it, so deleting Kimai while something else shares the project saves only Kimai's own compute part.
- Keep your 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 Kimai session for a class. Each participant gets Kimai in their own Google Cloud project for 15 minutes to 24 hours, within an allowance the trainer sets. Either the trainer funds every place up front, 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 Kimai 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 of the engagement 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 list prices from the Cloud Billing Catalog API; RAD fees and the 26-credit daily estimate from radmodules.dev/pricing; Delete and restore projects for the 30-day recovery window and what it says about Cloud Storage objects without soft delete. Kimai Cloud pricing. Prices change; check each source before relying on a figure.
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 imageFROM kimai/kimai2whose entrypoint composes Kimai's singleDATABASE_URLconnection 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 localdocker runtesting and live deployment. This is the:apacheimage 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) andADMINPASS(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; setmin_instance_count = 1to avoid this. enable_nfsdefaultstruebut is functionally unused. It mounts Cloud Filestore NFS at/var/lib/kimai, but the real persistent storage path is the GCS-FUSE-mountedstoragebucket 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 singledb-initjob is needed to create the database and user beforehand.
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 "$REGION" --limit 50
3. Kimai Application Behaviour
- A single
DATABASE_URLcomposed entirely at runtime, not passed through Terraform. Kimai's Doctrine DBAL layer reads one connection string,DATABASE_URL=mysql://user:pass@host:port/db?charset=utf8mb4&serverVersion=8.0, not discreteDB_*variables. Because the database password is a runtime secret unknown at plan time, and Cloud Run does not interpolate$(VAR)references the way Kubernetes does,Kimai_Commonbuilds a thin custom wrapper imageFROM kimai/kimai2whoseentrypoint.shcomposesDATABASE_URLat container start from the Foundation-injectedDB_USER/DB_NAME/DB_PASSWORD/DB_IPenv vars — URL-encoding the password withphp -r 'echo rawurlencode(...)'(the image has nopython3; it is a PHP image) — before handing off unmodified to the vendor's owndocker-php-entrypoint /entrypoint.sh. DB_IP, not the standardDB_HOST. The wrapper reads the host from$DB_IP(aliased viadb_host_env_var_name = "DB_IP"), which resolves to the raw Cloud SQL private IP on Cloud Run — a plain host with no colons, safe to place directly in amysql://...URL authority. The standardDB_HOSTcan instead be a Cloud SQL Unix socket-directory path containing colons, which would break URL parsing if used the same way.- Verified locally before ever touching the cloud. The password
URL-encoding step and the vendor's own DB-wait preflight check were both
confirmed by building the wrapper image and running it locally against a
real MySQL container with a password containing special characters
(
@:/?), catching and fixing issues before the first cloud deploy attempt. - Health check behaviour. Both the startup and liveness probes target
GET /en/login(Kimai's login page), which returns200once the application is ready./also works generically (Kimai issues a302redirect from the root path), but/en/loginis the precise, verified target actually configured.curl -s -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code}\n" "$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 wheneverADMINPASSis set — a no-op once the account exists. The username is alwaysadmin, hardcoded by the vendor image regardless ofadmin_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"
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_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 | false | 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. |
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. |
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. |
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.
Related guides
- Hands-on lab: Kimai on Cloud Run — deploy it step by step, with the console screens and commands at each stage.
- Kimai on GKE Autopilot — the same application on Kubernetes, for when you need the other deployment target.
- Kimai Common — Shared Application Configuration — the configuration shared by both deployment targets.
- Deployed alongside Dolibarr on Google Cloud Run, Invoice Ninja on Google Cloud Run, Docuseal on Google Cloud Run, Nextcloud on Google Cloud Run in the Small Business Suite solution.
Need RAD to do something it does not do yet? Request it on the roadmap, or vote on what is already there.