Error code 13, message: An internal error occurred. When deploying to App Engine using terraform

Question

I'm trying to create a new terraform project as simple as possible that should create an app engine application and deploy a hello world node.js app.

My repository: https://github.com/Leejjon/ts-appengine-terraform

I can run my https://github.com/Leejjon/ts-appengine-terraform/blob/main/terraform/main.tf file with "terraform apply" and it creates all resources just fine, until I add the actual google_app_engine_standard_app_version, which will fail with:

google_app_engine_standard_app_version.app_v2: Creating...
google_app_engine_standard_app_version.app_v2: Still creating... [10s elapsed]
google_app_engine_standard_app_version.app_v2: Still creating... [20s elapsed]
google_app_engine_standard_app_version.app_v2: Still creating... [30s elapsed]
╷
│ Error: Error waiting to create StandardAppVersion: Error waiting for Creating StandardAppVersion: Error code 13, message: An internal error occurred.
│
│   with google_app_engine_standard_app_version.app_v2,
│   on main.tf line 80, in resource "google_app_engine_standard_app_version" "app_v2":
│   80: resource "google_app_engine_standard_app_version" "app_v2" {
│
╵

Steps to reproduce:

• Clone my repo https://github.com/Leejjon/ts-appengine-terraform
• Set up a GCP account.
• Create a project in GCP.
• Install and configure the gcloud CLI
• Install terraform
• Comment out line 8-12 in main.tf to just use a local terraform statefile (using a bucket for it is not needed for this reproduction scenario)
• Run npm install in the app folder.
• Run terraform apply inside of the terraform folder

I did verify that I am able to deploy the app using the app.yaml file by running "gcloud app deploy --version=x" inside the app folder: https://github.com/Leejjon/ts-appengine-terraform/blob/main/app/app.yaml

However, it's quite unclear to me what the gcloud app deploy command does under the hood, and how I can replicate that using terraform.

My terraform project is based on:

• The terraform app engine docs https://registry.terraform.io/providers/hashicorp/google/latest/docs/resources/app_engine_application.html
• The google cloud terraform docs: https://cloud.google.com/docs/terraform/resource-management/store-state
• This example https://github.com/nearform/gcp-articles/blob/master/3-tiers-app-engine/terraform/app-engine.tf
• This example https://github.com/srikavin/waitlist-watcher/blob/master/terraform/modules/appengine/main.tf

I also posted this on their app engine issue tracker, but they say they won't help troubleshooting terraform projects: https://issuetracker.google.com/u/3/issues/295518542

Please help me figure out how to troubleshoot this. If it's a permission thing, I was trying to look into the Audit logs to see if somehow terraform had no permissions to to something, but by default nothing is enabled in the Audit logs.

Answer 1

I managed to fixed the error by using a different approach to create a zip file and upload it to the storage bucket, this PR fixed my problem: https://github.com/Leejjon/ts-appengine-terraform/pull/1/files

I kindly copied this approach from this repository: https://github.com/Ipsossiapi/pt_streams

I noticed it fails if I don't upload the node_modules folder. Which is a bit weird as when I use the gcloud app deploy command I don't upload the node_modules folder either (I had the node_modules folder ignored in the .gcloudignore file. Apparently the appengine terraform plugin uses the GCP API instead and it works different.