Deploying Crystal application to GAE (Google App Engine)

Introduction

In this article I will be creating a dumb and simple API and deploy it to GAE (Google App Engine). There is not so much documentation about deploying a crystal app to GAE, so it might be valuable for some developers.

For the web server I will be using Kemal. It is a simple web server for Crystal, and very similar to Sinatra in Ruby.

Installation

First you will need to install Kemal. Add kemalr/kemal to your shards.yml file.

shards.yml

name: app_name
version: 0.1.0

targets:
  app_name:
    main: src/main.cr

crystal: 0.27.0

license: MIT

dependencies:
  kemal:
    github: kemalcr/kemal

And install the dependencies.

$ shards install

Everything is setup, so let's start coding.

Code

For this example, I will be creating one route, which is the root(/) and returning a static JSON.

src/main.cr

require "kemal"

before_all do |env|
  env.response.content_type = "application/json"
end

get "/" do
  {"app": "Hello World", "version": "0.1.0"}.to_json
end

Kemal.run

Build and run the app.

$ crystal build src/main.cr
$ ./main

Access http://localhost:3000, then it will display the following JSON.

{
  "app": "Hello World",
  "version": "0.1.0"
}

Not so interesting, but let's get it up on Google App Engine.

Deploy

Theres are two things you have to complete before starting to deploy to GAE. You should follow google's official documentation for these.

• Create a new Google Cloud Platform project and App Engine application using the Google Cloud Platform Console

  Docs : https://cloud.google.com/appengine/

• Download and install Cloud SDK and then initialize the gcloud tool:

  Docs : https://cloud.google.com/sdk/

Requirements

GAE has a lot of support for many languages (Go, PHP, Java, etc...), which makes it extremely easy to deploy. Unfortunately Crystal has no support, so you have to create your own custom runtime.

To create a custom runtime you must,

• Provide an app.yaml file that describes your application's runtime configuration to App Engine.
• Add a Dockerfile that internally configures the runtime environment.
• The server needs to be listening to port 8080

https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/flexible/custom-runtimes/build

Provide an app.yaml

Your app.yaml configuration file must contain at least the following settings:

runtime: custom
env: flex

This needs to be stored in the root of the project.

Add a Dockerfile, and listens to port 8080.

Provide your Dockerfile to the same path as your app.yaml. And don't forget to name it Dockerfile.

FROM crystallang/crystal

RUN mkdir -p /usr/src/app

WORKDIR /usr/src/app

COPY ./ ./

RUN crystal build src/main.cr --release

EXPOSE 8080

CMD ["./main", "-p", "8080"]

This Dockerfile should configure the environment for crystal, copies all the code, and build.

And most importantly run the app in port 8080, which GAE expects.

Finally Deploy it!

finally..

gcloud app deploy

After waiting for few minutes, it will be deployed, and can be accessed by https://your-project.appspot.com.

Summary

At the end it was very simple. The only complexity was configuring the Dockerfile (which was still very simple for a crystal app). This method can be applied to any kind of language without support from GAE!

Happy Coding!