Application Deployment on GCP

Create Instance

Sign in to Google Cloud Console (opens in a new tab) and navigate to SQL menu in the left sidebar or directly go here (opens in a new tab).

To create PostgreSQL, click Create instance, then select the PostgreSQL database engine.

Settings & Configuration

The next step is to configure the database instance settings such as username, password, PostgreSQL version, region, etc.

There are some mandatory settings and configurations that need to be set. For example, our generated application is about Anime Figure Store. We can set the fields:

• Instance ID: animefigurestore
• Password: We can fill in anything or generate the password.
• Database Version: The default version is the latest version of PostgreSQL. We will use version 15.

The Cloud SQL edition preset, region, and availability are configurable. Choose as per your needs. Be aware that these settings and configurations will affect the database pricing estimation.

Create Database

After creating the database instance, we can create a new one for the generated application. Go to the SQL Databases menu, then add a new database by clicking the Create Database button.

We will use animefiguredb as the generated application database name.

Create Users

Google Cloud SQL provides the default admin user postgres without any password. You need to set a password for this user before you can log in. You can do this in the Google Cloud console or using the gcloud command. The database instance for this example is animefigurestore.

gcloud sql users set-password postgres \
--instance=animefigurestore \
--password=SECRETP4ST$

Another option is to create new users. We can do this using the Users menu and then clicking ADD USER ACCOUNT.

We will use owner as the database username.

DATABASE_URL

After creating the database, we can get the connection credentials, such as the IP address, username, password, and database name, from the Connections section.

We can configure the Cloud SQL instance to have a public IPv4 address and to accept connections from specific IP addresses or a range of addresses by adding authorized addresses to your instance.

For the deployment purpose, we will allow database access from the public internet. Set the allowed IP address to 0.0.0.0/0

From all the settings, we can form the PostgreSQL URI to connect our generated application.

DATABASE_URL=postgresql://owner:password@34.28.181.197:5432/animefiguredb

app.yaml

Before uploading the application to Google App Engine, it is important to configure the project. Create app.yaml file in the generated application root folder and fill it with these contents:

runtime: nodejs18 # specify the Node.js runtime
env: standard
manual_scaling:
  instances: 1
entrypoint: npm run start

This file specifies that the project uses runtime Node.js version 18 and the standard environment for Google App Engine. It also specifies the entry point or script to run after file uploading.

ROQ Environment

ROQ's generated application needs environment variables from the ROQ Console. We can create a new environment for the Google App Engine.

Select the desired application from the ROQ Console and add a new environment, or navigate to the ROQ Console Environment (opens in a new tab) for the active application.

We can also copy the environment variables from another environment. For example, to copy environment variables from the Preview environment. Go to the Environment Sync menu and then click the Copy Configuration button.

Google App Engine URL

Google App Engine has the following format URL for the default service:

https://PROJECT_ID.REGION_ID.r.appspot.com:

• PROJECT_ID: is the ID of your Google Cloud Project.
• REGION_ID: is the region where you deploy your App Engine application.

This URL is required as the base URL for the ROQ Platform configuration. Therefore, configure the environment variables in the generated application.

There are no exact ways to know this URL. The easiest way (and tricky) to know this URL at initially created GAE is by connecting the project first and then running the gcloud app deploy command:

gcloud app deploy

This command will return the information about the GAE application:

Services to deploy:
 
descriptor:                  [E:\_workspaces\ROQ\anime-scaled-fig-2d3f-v3\app.yaml]
source:                      [E:\_workspaces\ROQ\anime-scaled-fig-2d3f-v3]
target project:              [anime-figure-store]
target service:              [default]
target version:              [20230907t115249]
target url:                  [https://anime-figure-store.uc.r.appspot.com]
target service account:      [anime-figure-store@appspot.gserviceaccount.com]
 
 
Do you want to continue (Y/n)?

From the command response above, we have the Google App Engine deployment URL for our application:

https://anime-figure-store.uc.r.appspot.com

Setup the Base URL

The base URL needs to be setup in the ROQ Console. Go to the Application Details → Settings.

We need to setup the Base URL and all the Authentication URLs.

.env

Create an environment .env file if it doesn't exist in the generated application root folder, then copy all the environment variables from the ROQ Console and add the DATABASE_URL from our previous PostgreSQL database setup:

# get all the environment variables from the ROQ Console 
# ...
 
# PostgreSQL on Google Cloud SQL
DATABASE_URL=postgresql://owner:password@34.28.181.197:5432/animefiguredb

Build & Configure

Before uploading the code to the Google App Engine, we must build the project locally:

npm run build

It is necessary to run the Prisma migration on the PostgreSQL database for the generated application to function correctly. While other platforms, such as Vercel and Heroku, perform this step automatically along with the build process, no such automation is available on Google App Engine.

To use the PostgreSQL database we set up earlier, we need to run the migration manually:

npx prisma migrate deploy