Running Gradle Enterprise on the Google Cloud Platform

You can create a free account if you do not already have one.

You can request a Gradle Enterprise trial here. If you have purchased Gradle Enterprise, you will already have a license file.

You will be using the gcloud command line tool to provision and configure our server. To install on your local machine, there are instructions in the Google Cloud documentation.

Google Cloud Platform machines are provisioned with an external IP address but no hostname. If you want to access Gradle Enterprise by a host name of your choosing (e.g. gradle.mycompany.com), you will need the ability to create the necessary DNS record to route this name to the instance IP address.

You are able to easily update this later. You can start with the raw IP address, and later reconfigure to use a custom hostname if desired.

Your Gradle Enterprise instance will be accessible via the public Internet. By default, all communication with Gradle Enterprise is encrypted over HTTPS, either via self-signed certificate or a certificate issued to you by a trusted certificate authority. Once Gradle Enterprise is installed, you may switch off HTTPS via the Gradle Enterprise Admin Console if you prefer.

Using a self-signed certificate will require some extra configuration for the users of your Gradle Enterprise installation, but will also result in traffic being encrypted.

First, you need to log in to GCP by entering the command:

This will open a browser window and let you select the registered user to use. Once this is done, the following output will be displayed in the terminal window.

Machines on the Google Cloud Platform are organized into projects which have to have a globally unique ID between 6 and 30 characters in length (lowercase letters, digits or hyphens and starting with a letter).

Once you’ve decided on your «unique-project-id», you can issue the command:

After your project is created, you will need to enable billing via the UI by visiting this page, clicking “Select” to choose your freshly created Project, and then clicking “Link a billing account”.

You can then set this as the default project for gcloud by entering:

Looking at the requirements in the Gradle Enterprise Admin Manual, let’s create an instance with 250GB of storage, 4 CPUs and 8GB of RAM.

If you do not have a preferred operating system, gcloud will use debian-9 as a base operating system. The list of supported operating systems supported by Gradle Enterprise can be found here.

For this tutorial, let’s name the instance gradle-enterprise and define our settings by entering the following command in the terminal:

You will be asked if you want to enable the “compute.googleapis.com” for your project. Choose “Yes” to continue.

Then you will be asked to select a geographical zone to launch the instance in

You should generally pick the zone closest to you geographically to ensure the best performance, by entering the number next to the zone of choice.

The instance will then be created and in the output, you can see the “EXTERNAL_IP” of the instance 35.189.200.63.

On the Google Compute Platform, firewall rules are set at project level. There are some ports you will need to expose to access Gradle Enterprise. These are:

This can be done via the following three commands:

You can check these have been set correctly by the command:

If you intend to use a custom hostname to access your Gradle Enterprise instance, you now need to add the appropriate DNS records.

Add an A record for your hostname that points to the “External IP” address of your instance which you saw at the end of step 3 of this tutorial.

Alternatively, you can just use the “External IP” address in the following steps.

Whichever you choose, for the rest of the tutorial, this will be referred to as the «instance-address».

SSH into your instance with the following command:

This will ask you for a passphrase (which you will need to remember for next time you want to access the instance) and generate an SSH key. It will then ask you for the passphrase again, and if successful will give you command line access to the machine.

Once you’re on the machine, start the installation by issuing the command:

The installer will ask if you require a proxy to access the internet. Choose “No” to continue.

Once that has finished installing, open a web browser and navigate to https://«instance-address»:8800 to access the admin console (you will need to accept the warning in your browser due to there not being a valid SSL certificate).

Enter «instance-address» into the hostname field.

If you have a trusted SSL certificate for your hostname, you can upload it here. Otherwise, click “Use Self-Signed Cert”.

Select “Choose license” and specify your license file.

Choose a method for securing the admin console “Continue”.

The system will then perform some pre-flight checks, after which you can select “Continue”, and then select “Dashboard” from the navigation menu at the top of the page.

The latest version of Gradle Enterprise will begin downloading and will start automatically.

Once the dashboard shows “Started” in the left-hand panel, you can access Gradle Enterprise by either clicking “Open”, or by navigating to https://«instance-address».