LubeLogger on Google Cloud Run

LubeLogger is a free, open-source vehicle maintenance and fuel-mileage tracker built on ASP.NET Core (.NET), shipped as a single container image with an embedded LiteDB database. This module deploys LubeLogger 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 LubeLogger 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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What LubeLogger costs on RAD, and how that compares

LubeLogger on RAD's Cloud Run module costs about US$33 a month in your own project, with no per-vehicle fee. RAD charges 40 credits once per deployment in your own project (36 credits, 10% lower, in a project RAD manages), plus build time. LubeLogger also deploys on GKE Autopilot for about US$42 a month — see the GKE guide if you need it to run there instead. If you only need it occasionally, a RAD-managed project can be deleted and restored within 30 days for a few credits, so that monthly figure becomes a few dollars 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	40 credits (US$4.00 at the top-up price)	36 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$33 a month for the default configuration (table below)	Metered hourly in credits; RAD publishes 15 credits a day, about 450 a month (about US$45.00 at the top-up price, less on a plan)
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 / 1 GiB (warm)	US$13
NFS/cache file server (small VM)	US$13
Cloud NAT and networking	US$5
Cloud Storage (add-ons, backups)	US$1
Total	about US$33

How it compares

• AUTOsist, a commercial fleet-maintenance tracker, charges US$6–7 per vehicle per month, with a US$59-a-month minimum for 5 vehicles on its base Maintenance package.
• RAD's LubeLogger module costs about US$33 a month in your own project — in the same range as AUTOsist's 5-vehicle minimum, but with no per-vehicle fee and no vehicle count ceiling: a household tracking two cars costs exactly the same as a small fleet tracking twenty.
• Self-managed comparison: at 1 vCPU / 1 GiB, a Hetzner CPX22 or DigitalOcean 2 vCPU/4 GB droplet (~US$24/month) would run LubeLogger fine, but you would still run the OS, backups and upgrades yourself.

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

If LubeLogger 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 LubeLogger you only need occasionally — evaluating it, a demo environment, a seasonal or intermittent workload — 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 the database, any VM or the compute resource one by one — the whole project, and everything in it, simply stops.
• Restoring costs a few 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 LubeLogger behind Services_GCP (a small NFS/cache VM) and Project_GCP, that is roughly a handful of credits (under US$1) in total, against the about 45 credits (US$4.50) a full redeploy costs.
• So a month of occasional use can cost a few dollars, not US$33. Deploy LubeLogger, use it for a while, delete the project. Restore it next time you need it, confirm with Update, and delete it again when you're done. You pay only for the module fee once, the builds, and whatever time it was actually live.
• What this needs. You must own the project (not 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 evaluation use fits). Google says most services are fully working again within 36 hours of a restore.
• One real gap: nightly backups do not survive. Backups and other generated files 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 have customised LubeLogger and want to keep that work, copy a backup out (to Google Drive, or a bucket outside the project) before you delete. 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

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 — roughly 45 credits (US$4.50) in total. Deleting saves money only once LubeLogger would otherwise sit unused long enough to clear that redeploy cost against its own running cost — about 5 days or more, both in your own project (about US$1.09 a day) and in a RAD-managed one (15 credits a day).
• Most of the running cost is usually shared. For LubeLogger that is the database and the shared file/cache VM. They stop only when nothing else in the project uses them, so deleting this app while something else shares the project saves only this app'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 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 list prices from the Cloud Billing Catalog API; RAD fees and the daily-credit estimate from radmodules.dev/pricing; Delete and restore projects for the pause/restore mechanics and what it says about Cloud Storage objects without soft delete; AUTOsist. Prices change; check each source before relying on a figure.

1. Overview

LubeLogger runs as an ASP.NET Core container on Cloud Run v2. The deployment wires together a minimal set of Google Cloud services — there is no managed database in the default configuration:

Capability	Google Cloud service	Notes
Compute	Cloud Run v2	ASP.NET Core service, 1 vCPU / 1 GiB by default, serverless autoscaling; fixed at a single instance
Database	None (default)	LubeLogger's default mode uses an internal embedded LiteDB database file — no Cloud SQL instance is created
Object storage	Cloud Storage	Two buckets: storage (LiteDB database file + uploaded photos/receipts/documents) and dpkeys (ASP.NET Core Data Protection keys)
Cache & queue	None	LubeLogger has no Redis usage and no background worker/queue
Secrets	None	No secrets are generated — the first account is created via self-service registration
Ingress	Cloud Run URL / Cloud Load Balancing	Default run.app URL (ingress_settings = "all"); optional external HTTPS load balancer + custom domain

Sensible defaults worth knowing up front:

• No external database by default. database_type = "NONE" — LubeLogger's own embedded LiteDB database file is the source of truth, persisted via a GCS FUSE volume. LubeLogger also supports an optional external Postgres backend via a single POSTGRES_CONNECTION DSN environment variable, but this module does not wire Cloud SQL for it.
• Single instance only. min_instance_count = 1 and max_instance_count = 1 — LubeLogger's default mode serves one shared database file from one volume; running multiple instances against the same file corrupts it.
• Secure by default. EnableAuth = "true" overrides LubeLogger's own appsettings.json default of fully open access. There is no seeded admin account — the first person to complete the Register form on /Login gains access.
• Persistent Data Protection keys. A dedicated small dpkeys bucket is always mounted at /root/.aspnet/DataProtection-Keys so login sessions survive container restarts; this is separate from the main storage bucket.
• Prebuilt image, no build step. The module deploys the official ghcr.io/hargata/lubelogger image directly (mirrored into Artifact Registry by default) — there is no Dockerfile or Cloud Build involved.
• Health probes use /Login, not / — the app root is [Authorize]-gated and would fail an unauthenticated platform probe even on a healthy container.

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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 LubeLogger service

LubeLogger runs as a single Cloud Run v2 service (fixed at one instance). 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 Storage

Two dedicated Cloud Storage buckets are provisioned automatically:

• storage — mounted at /App/data via GCS FUSE; holds the embedded LiteDB database file and uploaded photos/receipts/documents.
• dpkeys — mounted at /root/.aspnet/DataProtection-Keys; holds ASP.NET Core's cookie/session signing keys.

gcloud storage buckets list --project "$PROJECT" --filter="name~lubelogger"
gcloud storage ls gs://<storage-bucket>/        # bucket names are in the Outputs

See App_CloudRun for GCS Fuse and CMEK options.

C. Networking & ingress

The service is reachable at its run.app URL by default (ingress_settings = "all"). 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.

D. Cloud Logging & Monitoring

Container logs flow to Cloud Logging; Cloud Run 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. LubeLogger Application Behaviour

• No first-deploy database setup. There is no db-init job — LubeLogger initialises its own LiteDB database file and directory structure (config/, documents/, images/, temp/, themes/, translations/ under /App/data) on first boot.
• No fixed admin credential. Open the service, go to /Login, and submit the Register form — that becomes the usable account. Complete this immediately after first deploy: EnableAuth = "true" restricts the rest of the app, but registration itself is open to anyone who can reach the URL until a first account exists.
• Health path. Startup and liveness probes target /Login — LubeLogger's public, unauthenticated page. The app root / is [Authorize]-gated and would 401/redirect an unauthenticated probe even on a healthy container.
• Optional external Postgres. LubeLogger supports a single POSTGRES_CONNECTION DSN environment variable (Host=<host>;Port=5432;Username=<user>;Password=<pass>;Database=<db>;) to use an external Postgres database instead of the embedded LiteDB file. This module does not provision Cloud SQL for this path — an operator supplying their own Postgres instance can set the variable via secret_environment_variables.
• Single instance, always. max_instance_count is fixed at 1 — LubeLogger's default mode has no distributed-locking or multi-writer support for its embedded database.
• Inspect the running revision:

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

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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 LubeLogger 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	lubelogger	Base name for resources. Do not change after first deploy.
application_display_name	LubeLogger	Human-readable name shown in the Console.
description	(set)	Service description.
application_version	latest	Image tag on ghcr.io/hargata/lubelogger. Since the image is prebuilt (not custom-built), this directly selects the released version.

Group 4 — Runtime & Scaling

Variable	Default	Description
deploy_application	true	Set false to provision infrastructure only.
cpu_limit	1000m	CPU per instance.
memory_limit	1Gi	Memory per instance.
min_instance_count	1	Kept at 1 to avoid cold starts.
max_instance_count	1	Must stay at 1 — LubeLogger's default mode serves one shared database file.
container_port	8080	LubeLogger listens on port 8080.
execution_environment	gen2	Gen2 required for GCS Fuse mounts.
timeout_seconds	300	Maximum request duration (0–3600 seconds).
enable_cloudsql_volume	false	LubeLogger's default mode has no Cloud SQL.
enable_image_mirroring	true	Mirror the LubeLogger image into Artifact Registry.
traffic_split	[]	Split traffic across revisions for staged rollouts.
max_revisions_to_retain	7	Declared for convention parity; not referenced by this module's deployment.

Group 5 — Access & Ingress Control

Variable	Default	Description
ingress_settings	all	Public access — LubeLogger is a user-facing web app.
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, merged with the module's default EnableAuth = "true".
secret_environment_variables	{}	Map of env var → Secret Manager secret name. Use this for POSTGRES_CONNECTION if wiring the optional external Postgres backend.
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/compliance.
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 10 — Storage & Filesystem

Variable	Default	Description
create_cloud_storage	true	Create GCS buckets defined in storage_buckets.
storage_buckets	[]	Additional GCS buckets beyond the auto-provisioned storage/dpkeys buckets.
enable_nfs	true	Not used by LubeLogger by default.
gcs_volumes	[]	Additional GCS Fuse volume mounts (requires gen2).
manage_storage_kms_iam / enable_artifact_registry_cmek	false	CMEK options.

Group 12 — Database Backend

Variable	Default	Description
database_type	NONE	Fixed — LubeLogger's default mode has no Cloud SQL database.
database_password_length	32	Not referenced in the default configuration.

Group 13 — Jobs & Scheduled Tasks

Variable	Default	Description
initialization_jobs	[]	LubeLogger's default mode needs no init job.
cron_jobs	[]	No platform-scheduled recurring tasks by default.

Group 14 — Observability & Health

Variable	Default	Description
startup_probe	HTTP /Login 15s delay	Startup probe.
liveness_probe	HTTP /Login 30s delay	Liveness probe.
startup_probe_config	HTTP /Login	Alternative structured probe.
health_check_config	HTTP /Login	Alternative structured liveness probe.
uptime_check_config	{ enabled=false, path="/Login" }	Cloud Monitoring uptime check; disabled by default.
alert_policies	[]	Metric alert policies.

Group 23 — VPC Service Controls & Audit Logging

Variable	Default	Description
enable_vpc_sc	false	Enforce a VPC-SC perimeter (requires 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

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

Output	Description
service_name	Cloud Run service name.
lubelogger_url	Internal VPC URL for the LubeLogger web UI.
service_location	Region the service runs in.
stage_services	Stage-specific service URLs (Cloud Deploy).
load_balancer_ip / load_balancer_url	External HTTPS load balancer IP / URL (when enabled).
storage_buckets	Created Cloud Storage buckets (storage, dpkeys).
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.
deployment_id / tenant_id / resource_prefix	Naming identifiers.
project_id / project_number	Project identifiers.
cicd_enabled / github_repository_url / github_repository_owner / github_repository_name / 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
max_instance_count	1	Critical	LubeLogger's default mode serves one shared embedded database file from one volume; more than one instance risks database corruption from concurrent writers.
storage/dpkeys buckets	Never delete	Critical	Losing storage loses every vehicle record; losing dpkeys invalidates all existing login sessions (recoverable — forces re-login only).
EnableAuth	true (default)	Critical	Setting it to false reverts to LubeLogger's fully open-access mode — anyone with the URL can view/edit all data with no login at all.
First-run registration	Complete immediately after deploy	High	Until a first account is registered, the Register form is reachable by anyone who can reach the URL.
startup_probe/liveness_probe path	/Login	Critical	Pointing probes at / (or any [Authorize]-gated path) fails the probe on an otherwise-healthy container — the revision never becomes Ready.
database_type	NONE (default)	High	LubeLogger's default mode ignores this setting entirely; changing it does not connect LubeLogger to a Cloud SQL instance — use POSTGRES_CONNECTION instead for the optional external Postgres path.
min_instance_count	1	Medium	Setting to 0 allows cold starts; since max_instance_count is fixed at 1 there is no traffic-splitting risk, only added latency on the first request after idle.
backup_retention_days	7 (raise for prod)	Medium	Too short for compliance retention.
enable_cloud_armor	enable for production	Medium	The public web UI and REST API are reachable without WAF protection otherwise.

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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. LubeLogger-specific application configuration shared with the GKE variant is described in LubeLogger_Common.

Related guides

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