GCP deployment Tutorial outdated

[mxye]

Description
The tutorial at https://www.meilisearch.com/docs/learn/cookbooks/gcp is outdated. Steps mentioned do not match actual steps.

Expected behavior
In particular, when creating an image, the GCP page asks for "Virtual disk file" as a mandatory field.

Current behavior
The tutorial shows only how to fill in a mandatory field called "Cloud storage file", which doesn't exist on the GCP page. If I fill in the uri provided by the tutorial to the "Virtual disk file" field, I get an error "Object not available. Either it does not exist or you do not have access. Try browsing for the object instead." This is after I've granted access as prompted by the GCP page.

[curquiza]

Hello @mxye
thanks for the report, moving this to the right repo

[mxye]

Thank you! I've now waited for three weeks, but I still don't know how to deploy meilisearch with GCP. It's not just that the documentation needs update. The more essential question is, how does anyone succeed in deploying meilisearch with GCP? Have you guys stopped supporting GCP at this point?

[guimachiavelli]

Hello @mxye—apologies for keeping you on hold. We have not stopped supporting GCP and we do plan to update our GCP guide in the near future. I cannot give you a precise date, unfortunately.

In the meantime, you might be able to get more immediate help by reaching out to our support team and the community in our Discord server.

[CaroFG]

Another user reported the following on Discord:

I'm working through this guide https://www.meilisearch.com/docs/guides/deployment/gcp. It might be out of date because the fields no longer seem to match the GCP form. The guide says to choose a "Cloud Storage File" and then to paste in the value (e.g. meilisearch-image/meilisearch-v1.0.2-debian-10.vmdk). However, GCP insists that a cloud storage file ends in tar.gz so the form won't validate at this point. If instead you choose "VMDK file" and paste the path, GCP says that the object is not available because you don't have access to it

[mattbodman]

I'd happily contribute a PR to update this guide if I knew where to download the current VMDK file. That is the primary issue. GCP doesn't allow access to wherever the file is currently stored by nature of the form validation. So, if the file is publicly available/downloadable, then the guide could probably be updated fairly easily.

[guimachiavelli]

Thanks for bringing this to my attention again, @CaroFG and @mattbodman. I unfortunately had to prioritize maintaining other parts of the docs and was not able to dedicate much attention to GCP.

@brunoocasali, do you know if the VMDK file is available anywhere public?

[brunoocasali]

Hi @mattbodman here is the public link of the https://storage.googleapis.com/meilisearch-image/meilisearch-v1-10-0-debian-11.vmdk can you check if the tutorial works with that? It is been a long time than my last contact with GCP and you may be right about the tutorial being outdated.

We generate our images using this script https://github.com/meilisearch/cloud-providers (Hashicorp's Packer). But from what I see I need to generate it now using tar.gz not only vmdk files anymore but before investing time to fix the script, can you confirm that info @mattbodman based on your GCP knowledge?

[mattbodman]

Hi @brunoocasali I have been able to create the image by first downloading your publicly available VMDK file, then uploading it to one of my GCP Storage Buckets. I was then able to browse from the VMDK input field to that file in my bucket. This might be inconvenient for some, but it does get the job done. The issue seems to be that the file link you have in the guide is not a GS link and it's not publicly available. I think if those two things are rectified, the guide will still be fine, as-is.

[guimachiavelli]

(gently) pinging @brunoocasali

[guimachiavelli]

We no longer support GCP, as described in the issue linked above.