Deploying the Strapi catalog starter project onto GCP fails

[ChintiminiFarm]

Background:

• We've been exploring Strapi, and are trying to demonstrate some of Strapi's capabilities to development partners.
• The Strapi Gatsby Catalog Starter covers a large part of the basic functionality we are interested in demonstrating.
• In order to demo this Strapi Catalog Starter project, we want it running not just on a localhost instance (that's to be expected) but rather on a realistic deployment platform such as GCP, where our remote partners can evaluate it.
• We've had experience making some initial deployments of Strapi apps onto GCP. In doing so, we've followed the guidance provided by:
  • the Strapi (general) Deployment Guide
  • and (specific) Google App Engine Guide
  • and (reference) Strapi Configurations Guide
  • ...and we've create and deployed this demo Strapi CMS instance running on GCP. So we know this can be done.

As a side note, we've also done fairly complex deployments onto GCP (including PostgreSQL, Node.js, Loopback, Django, etc.). So we're fairly familiar with many of the typical issues which can crop up on GCP.

Deployment Failure on GCP:

We've tried to apply the techniques we've learned (from the previous successful deployments of Strapi onto GCP) to the Strapi Gatsby Catalog Starter project.

This is proving to be extremely problematic. Current instances fail with what looks to be (based on previous experience with both Strapi and Django deployments) a database connectivity type error (the error can be seen here... live).

But even prior to that, build cycles for the demo on GCP were running into very arcane errors, such as this:

• Step #6 - "builder": Failure: (ID: 98e389b6) ...versions could cause a slowdown up to 100x even if nothing is polyfilled. Please, upgrade your dependencies to the actual version of core-js.

• (Here is a reference link to our live GitLab issue w/ logs, etc.)

We don't have enough experience with Strapi to understand all the issues (yet) but we believe these problems indicate some basic component and version incompatibilities with the Gatsby Catalog Starter project, which is (understandably) more complex (it looks like it pulls in a lot of UI elements from things like Tailwind, etc.?)

Support Request:

We managed to resolve the build errors with some (hopefully correct) guessing based on experience, but we can't say with confidence that our choices to resolve the build errors we ran into actually led to a correct, runnable build.

It would be good for someone with direct experience designing and building this app to weigh in on the arcane build errors.

And the post-build run-time errors look to be a data connectivity error, but we've had a lot of experience resolving those type of issues, and we think we've run through all "the usual suspects" and we... still... stuck. So it would be good to get some opinions on that as well.

Would it be possible for someone involved with this project to run through the standard deployment practices given by the Strapi guides and verify that this starter project can actually run on GCP?

Strapi is a really cool technology. In fact, it's more -- it's revolutionary. We'd really like to use it. But it needs to be deployable across real cloud services, otherwise it's just a cool thing on a developer's platform. Guidance to resolve this deployment issue would be most appreciated.

[ChintiminiFarm]

Check this for now. I did manage to get a deployment. There's just a large gap in the documentation & guidance.

I've managed to thread the needle -- let me see if I can make that process reproducible.

Then I'll see what I can do in the way of documentation on my end.

[markkaylor]

Hey @ChintiminiFarm thanks for the update. If you find a solution and could improve the documentations please feel free to open a PR, that would help us a lot. https://github.com/strapi/documentation. Let me know if you are still running into problems and I will try to find some time to take a look.