Certification track: AI Tooling
Open WebUI on Google Cloud Run
Open WebUI is a self-hosted AI interface providing a polished ChatGPT-style frontend for Ollama, OpenAI-compatible APIs, and dozens of other LLM providers. This module deploys Open WebUI 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 Open WebUI 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 OpenWebUI costs on RAD, and how that compares
For a small team, OpenWebUI on RAD's Cloud Run module costs about US$102 a month with no per-user licence. No official "Open WebUI Cloud" exists with public pricing — the project ships as self-hosted software only — so a self-managed server is the only cash-cheaper alternative, and then you run the database, backups, security patches and upgrades yourself. Figures are as at 8 October 2026; sources are listed at the end of this section.
If you only need it occasionally — studying for a certification, a demo, a seasonal business — a RAD-managed project can be deleted and restored within 30 days for a few credits, so that US$102 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 | 110 credits (US$11 at the top-up price) | 99 credits (10% lower) |
| Build time | About 19 credits per build (RAD's average build takes about 19 minutes) | The same |
| Google Cloud running cost | Billed by Google to your own billing account (table below) | Metered hourly in credits; RAD publishes 32 credits a day, about 960 credits a month (about US$96 at the top-up price, US$77 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, 2x vCPU / 4 GiB (scaleToZero) | US$31.53 |
| Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL, 1 vCPU / 3.75 GB, zonal, 10 GB SSD | US$51.02 |
| NFS/cache file server (small VM) | US$13.43 |
| Cloud NAT and networking | US$5 |
| Cloud Storage (add-ons, backups) | US$1 |
| Total | about US$102 |
- Cloud SQL and Cloud Run cost the same in africa-south1 (Johannesburg); the VM costs about 10% more.
- Scale-to-zero is the default. The Cloud Run line above already reflects that cost; setting
min_instance_count = 1keeps an instance warm and raises this line, in exchange for no cold starts. - Avoid Filestore for a small deployment. The module uses a small NFS/cache VM by default. Filestore's smallest instance is 1 TiB, which costs about US$164 a month on its own.
How it compares
- No official "Open WebUI Cloud" exists with public pricing — the project ships as self-hosted software — so this compares against a bare server.
- A bare VPS sized close to Open WebUI's 2 vCPU / 4 GiB footprint — Hetzner CPX22 or a DigitalOcean 2 vCPU/4 GB Droplet, both about US$24/month, or a GCP Compute Engine e2-standard-2 (2 vCPU/8 GB) at about US$49/month — is cheaper in cash than either RAD figure above.
- RAD's managed Cloud SQL (chat history, accounts) and Secret Manager (the API keys for the LLM providers behind it) replace the backups, patching and secrets-handling you would otherwise do yourself on a VPS.
- If OpenWebUI needs to stay up without scaling to zero, or run beside other Kubernetes workloads, see the GKE guide instead — about US$150 a month in your own project, or 3,480 credits (about US$278–348) a month in one RAD manages.
Pause it for free: delete a RAD-managed project, restore it when you need it
If OpenWebUI 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 occasional use — studying for a certification, a demo environment, a seasonal business — far better than running OpenWebUI 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, any VM or Cloud Run 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. That costs a handful of credits (under US$1) for a typical 2–3-deployment chain, against the 115 credits (US$11.50) a full redeploy costs below.
- So a month of occasional use can cost a few dollars, not US$102. Deploy OpenWebUI, use it for a while, delete the project. Restore it next time you want 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 OpenWebUI was actually live.
- 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. OpenWebUI's 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 have made changes to OpenWebUI you want to keep, 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 115 credits (US$11.50), because RAD recreates the project and shared services before OpenWebUI. Deleting saves money only once OpenWebUI would otherwise sit unused for about 4 days or more, both in your own project (about US$3.40 a day) and in a RAD-managed one (32 credits a day).
- Most of the running cost is usually the database and the shared file/cache VM. They stop only when nothing else in the project uses them, so deleting OpenWebUI while something else shares the project saves only OpenWebUI's own compute part.
- Keep data first. Backups are written 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.
- RAD does not recreate a deleted deployment for you; you enter the settings again when you deploy.
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; radmodules.dev/pricing for RAD's own fees and daily-credit estimates; Delete and restore projects for the pause/restore window and what it says about Cloud Storage objects without soft delete.
1. Overview
Open WebUI runs as a Python web container on Cloud Run v2. The deployment wires together a focused set of Google Cloud services:
| Capability | Google Cloud service | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Compute | Cloud Run v2 | Python web service, 2 vCPU / 4 GiB by default, request-based autoscaling |
| Database | Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL 15 | Required — sessions, conversations, and RAG data all live here |
| Shared files | Filestore (NFS) | Optional — needed only when multiple instances share uploaded files |
| Object storage | Cloud Storage | A dedicated data bucket provisioned automatically |
| Secrets | Secret Manager | Auto-generated WEBUI_SECRET_KEY and 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:
- PostgreSQL 15 is required. Open WebUI does not support MySQL or any other engine; the database type is fixed internally.
- No Redis. Open WebUI persists sessions and all application state in PostgreSQL.
The
enable_redisvariable defaults tofalseand no Redis environment variables are injected. WEBUI_SECRET_KEYis auto-generated and stored in Secret Manager. It signs all user sessions; rotating it invalidates every active session simultaneously. Treat it as immutable after first use.- New users require admin approval by default.
default_user_role = "pending"means self-registered accounts cannot access the UI until an admin promotes them. - Scale-to-zero is enabled.
min_instance_countdefaults to0; set it to1for a warm instance in interactive team deployments. - Health probes target
/health. Open WebUI exposes this path natively; both startup and liveness probes use HTTP against it. DATABASE_URLis assembled automatically. The custom entrypoint constructs it from the platform-injectedDB_*environment variables — do not set it manually.- Gen2 execution environment is required for NFS mounts and Direct VPC Egress.
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 Open WebUI service
Open WebUI 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 "$REGION"
See App_CloudRun for scaling, concurrency, execution environment, and traffic splitting.
B. Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL 15
Open WebUI stores all application data — user accounts, conversations, RAG indices, and uploaded document embeddings — in a managed Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL 15 instance. The service connects privately through the Cloud SQL Auth Proxy over a Unix socket (no public IP). On first deploy an initialization Job creates the application database and user.
- Console: SQL → select the instance for connections, backups, flags, metrics.
- CLI:
gcloud sql instances list --project "$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
A dedicated Cloud Storage bucket (openwebui-data) is provisioned automatically
for Open WebUI's backend data directory. The workload service account is granted access
automatically.
- Console: Cloud Storage → Buckets.
- CLI:
gcloud storage buckets list --project "$PROJECT"
gcloud storage ls gs://<data-bucket>/ # bucket name is in the Outputs
See App_CloudRun for GCS Fuse and CMEK options.
D. Filestore (NFS) — optional shared storage
NFS is enabled by default. It provides shared persistent storage across all instances, which is important when running more than one instance and uploaded files must be visible everywhere. NFS requires the Gen2 execution environment.
- Console: Filestore → Instances.
- CLI:
gcloud filestore instances list --project "$PROJECT"
See App_CloudRun for the NFS mount and Gen2 requirements.
E. Secret Manager
WEBUI_SECRET_KEY (session signing key) and the database password are stored in
Secret Manager and injected into the service at runtime; plaintext never appears in
configuration or logs.
- Console: Security → Secret Manager.
- CLI:
gcloud secrets list --project "$PROJECT"
gcloud secrets versions access latest --secret=<secret-name> --project "$PROJECT"
See App_CloudRun for injection and rotation details.
F. 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; ingress
settings and VPC egress control connectivity.
- 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.
G. 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. Open WebUI Application Behaviour
- First-deploy database setup. An initialization Job (
db-init) runspostgres:15-alpineagainst the Cloud SQL instance through the Auth Proxy. It idempotently creates the application database and user before the service starts. - Database migrations on start. Open WebUI runs its own Alembic schema migrations
on every startup, so upgrading
application_versionapplies any new schema changes automatically. On first boot this can take 30–60 seconds. DATABASE_URLassembly. The custom entrypoint (entrypoint.sh) assembles theDATABASE_URLfrom the platform-injectedDB_HOST,DB_USER,DB_PASSWORD, andDB_NAMEenvironment variables. The password is URL-encoded to handle special characters. Do not overrideDATABASE_URLdirectly.WEBUI_SECRET_KEYis immutable. The key signs all user sessions. Rotating it immediately logs out every active user and invalidates all remember-me tokens. Treat it as permanent after the first login.- AI backend connection. Open WebUI connects to an Ollama instance or an
OpenAI-compatible API at startup. If neither
ollama_base_urlnoropenai_api_base_urlis configured, the UI starts but has no AI backend — all model inference requests fail. Supply API keys (e.g.OPENAI_API_KEY) viasecret_environment_variables, notenvironment_variables. - User registration flow. With
default_user_role = "pending"(the default) all self-registered accounts must be promoted by an admin before they can use the UI. The first admin account must be created directly through the signup page on first boot. - Health path. Both startup and liveness probes use HTTP against
/health, which returns 200 once the application and database connection are ready. The startup probe allows up to 300 seconds (30 failures × 10-second period) for first-boot migration to complete.
4. Configuration Variables
Variables are grouped exactly as they appear on the deployment platform. Only settings specific to or notable for Open WebUI 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 | openwebui | Base name for resources. Do not change after first deploy. |
display_name | Open WebUI | Friendly name shown in the Console. |
description | Open WebUI — self-hosted AI interface for Ollama and OpenAI-compatible APIs | Service description. |
application_version | latest | Open WebUI image version tag. Pin to a specific release in production. |
Group 4 — Runtime & Scaling
| Variable | Default | Description |
|---|---|---|
deploy_application | true | Set false to provision infrastructure only. |
cpu_limit | 2000m | CPU per instance; 2 vCPU recommended for RAG workloads. |
memory_limit | 4Gi | Memory per instance; 4 GiB recommended (RAG pipelines can use 3–6 GiB). |
min_instance_count | 0 | Minimum instances; set 1 to keep a warm instance for interactive use. |
max_instance_count | 3 | Maximum instances. |
container_port | 8080 | Open WebUI's HTTP port (matches the official image's EXPOSE). |
execution_environment | gen2 | Gen2 required for NFS mounts and Direct VPC Egress. |
timeout_seconds | 300 | Max request duration. Increase to 600–3600 for document ingestion or slow LLM backends. |
enable_cloudsql_volume | true | Cloud SQL Auth Proxy sidecar — must be true when connecting to Cloud SQL. |
enable_image_mirroring | true | Mirror the Open WebUI image into Artifact Registry (avoids GHCR rate limits). |
traffic_split | [] | Canary/blue-green traffic allocation across revisions. |
Group 5 — Open WebUI Settings & Access
| Variable | Default | Description |
|---|---|---|
ollama_base_url | "" | Base URL for the Ollama backend (e.g. http://ollama:11434). Leave empty if not using Ollama directly. |
openai_api_base_url | "" | Base URL for an OpenAI-compatible API (e.g. https://api.openai.com/v1). Must include /v1 suffix. |
default_user_role | pending | Role assigned to new self-registered accounts. pending requires admin approval; user grants immediate access. |
enable_signup | true | Allow the signup page. Set false after admin accounts are created in production. |
webui_auth | true | Enable the login form. Only set false for single-user or fully air-gapped deployments. |
ingress_settings | all | Which traffic sources may reach the service (all, internal, internal-and-cloud-load-balancing). |
vpc_egress_setting | PRIVATE_RANGES_ONLY | How outbound traffic is routed through the VPC connector. |
enable_iap | false | Require Google sign-in via Identity-Aware Proxy. |
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 override DATABASE_URL or WEBUI_SECRET_KEY. |
secret_environment_variables | {} | Map of env var → Secret Manager secret name. Use for OPENAI_API_KEY and similar sensitive values. |
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 9 — Custom SQL
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. |
admin_ip_ranges | [] | CIDR ranges exempted from WAF rules. |
application_domains | [] | Custom hostnames for the external load balancer. |
enable_cdn | false | Enable Cloud CDN on the LB backend. |
max_images_to_retain / delete_untagged_images / image_retention_days | (set) | Artifact Registry cleanup policy. |
Group 11 — Storage & Filesystem
| Variable | Default | Description |
|---|---|---|
enable_nfs | true | Shared Filestore volume — needed when multiple instances share uploaded files. |
nfs_mount_path | /mnt/nfs | Mount path inside the container. |
create_cloud_storage | true | Provision the data bucket. |
storage_buckets | [] | Additional buckets beyond the automatically provisioned data bucket. |
gcs_volumes | [] | GCS Fuse mounts for extra bucket-backed directories. |
manage_storage_kms_iam / enable_artifact_registry_cmek | false | CMEK options. |
Group 12 — Database Backend
| Variable | Default | Description |
|---|---|---|
database_type | POSTGRES_15 | Fixed — Open WebUI requires PostgreSQL 15. |
db_name | openwebui_db | Database name. Immutable after first deploy. |
db_user | openwebui_user | Application user. Immutable after first deploy. |
database_password_length | 32 | Generated password length (16–64). |
enable_auto_password_rotation | false | Zero-downtime DB password rotation. |
Group 13 — Jobs & Scheduled Tasks
| Variable | Default | Description |
|---|---|---|
initialization_jobs | [] | Leave empty to use the built-in db-init job. |
cron_jobs | [] | Open WebUI has no required scheduled commands; add any app-specific recurring tasks here. |
Group 14 — Observability & Health
| Variable | Default | Description |
|---|---|---|
startup_probe | HTTP /health, 30s delay, 5s timeout, 10s period, 30 retries | Allows up to ~5 minutes for first-boot startup. |
liveness_probe | HTTP /health, 60s delay, 5s timeout, 30s period, 3 retries | Liveness probe. |
uptime_check_config | { enabled=false, path="/health" } | Cloud Monitoring uptime check; disabled by default. |
alert_policies | [] | Metric alert policies. |
Group 21 — Redis Cache
| Variable | Default | Description |
|---|---|---|
enable_redis | false | Redis is not needed — Open WebUI persists all state in PostgreSQL. |
redis_host | "" | Redis endpoint (only relevant if enable_redis is set to true). |
Group 22 — 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. |
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. |
stage_services | Stage-specific service URLs (Cloud Deploy). |
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 / 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 | Names of the setup jobs. |
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. |
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
enable_cloudsql_volume | true | Critical | Disabling breaks all database connections when using Cloud SQL. Only disable when connecting to an external PostgreSQL over TCP. |
WEBUI_SECRET_KEY (auto-generated) | immutable after first use | Critical | Rotating the key immediately logs out every active user and invalidates all remember-me tokens. |
webui_auth | true | Critical | Disabling removes the login form — anyone who can reach the URL has full admin access with no credentials. |
db_name / db_user | set once | Critical | Immutable after first deploy; changing recreates the database/user and destroys all data. |
enable_backup_import | false unless restoring | Critical | Enabling without a valid backup_uri fails the import job. |
database_type (fixed) | POSTGRES_15 | Critical | Open WebUI requires PostgreSQL; any other engine breaks migrations and startup. |
ollama_base_url / openai_api_base_url | at least one set | High | Without a backend URL, Open WebUI starts but all model inference requests fail immediately. |
default_user_role | pending | High | user auto-approves all self-registrations; on a publicly exposed service this allows unrestricted sign-up. |
enable_signup | true (set false in prod after onboarding) | High | Combined with default_user_role = "user", any visitor can self-register and access all models. |
memory_limit | 4Gi | High | RAG pipelines can consume 3–6 GiB under load; insufficient memory causes OOM kills mid-ingestion. |
backup_schedule | 0 2 * * * | High | Without automated backups, the PostgreSQL database (users, conversations, RAG data) is unprotected. |
ingress_settings | restrict in prod | High | all exposes the UI to the public internet — combine with webui_auth = true and default_user_role = "pending". |
execution_environment | gen2 | High | NFS mounts and Direct VPC Egress are not supported in gen1. |
application_version | pinned release in prod | Medium | latest risks an unintended upgrade with a schema change that crashes startup. |
min_instance_count | 1 for interactive use | Medium | 0 adds 20–40 s cold-start latency when the first request arrives. |
enable_nfs | true when max_instance_count > 1 | Medium | Without shared storage, uploaded files are instance-local and invisible to other replicas. |
timeout_seconds | 300 (raise for RAG/LLM) | Medium | Document ingestion and large model responses are cut off at the Cloud Run timeout. |
enable_iap / enable_cloud_armor | enable for production | Medium | Without them, the UI is publicly reachable with only Open WebUI's built-in auth as a gate. |
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. Open WebUI-specific application configuration shared with the GKE variant is described in OpenWebUI_Common.
Related guides
- Hands-on lab: OpenWebUI on Cloud Run — deploy it step by step, with the console screens and commands at each stage.
- Open WebUI on GKE Autopilot — the same application on Kubernetes, for when you need the other deployment target.
- Open WebUI Common — Shared Application Configuration — the configuration shared by both deployment targets.
- Deployed alongside Ollama on Google Cloud Run, LiteLLM on Google Cloud Run, Qdrant on Google Cloud Run, SearXNG on Google Cloud Run in the Private AI Assistant solution.
Need RAD to do something it does not do yet? Request it on the roadmap, or vote on what is already there.