Deploy Retool on Google Compute Engine

Learn how to deploy Self-hosted Retool with a GCP Compute Engine VM.

The following instructions assume you're deploying the most recent release, either 3.33 Stable or 3.46 Edge.

You can deploy an instance of Self-hosted Retool on Google Compute Engine with Docker Compose.

Requirements

To deploy Retool, you need:

• A Retool license key, which you can obtain from the Retool Self-hosted Portal or your Retool account manager.
• Familiarity with and installations of Docker Engine and Docker Compose.

VM configuration

Self-hosted Retool instances require a Linux-based virtual machine that meets the following requirements:

• Ubuntu 22.04 or later.
• 16GiB memory.
• 8x vCPUs.
• 60GiB storage.
• curl and unzip software packages installed.

Allocate more resources to scale

Retool recommends you allocate more resources than the minimum requirements so that your instance can more easily scale.

Temporal

Temporal is a distributed system used to schedule and run asynchronous tasks for Retool Workflows. A Self-hosted Retool instance uses a Temporal cluster to facilitate the execution of each workflow amongst a pool of self-hosted workers that make queries and execute code in your VPC. Temporal manages the queueing, scheduling, and orchestration of workflows to guarantee that each workflow block executes in the correct order of the control flow. It does not store any block results by default.

You can use a Retool-managed cluster on Temporal Cloud, which is recommended for most use cases. You can also use an existing self-managed cluster that is hosted on Temporal Cloud or in your own infrastructure. Alternatively, you can spin up a new self-hosted cluster alongside your Self-hosted Retool instance.

Retool-managed cluster

Recommended

You should use a Retool-managed cluster if:

• You are on a version greater than 3.6.14.
• Your organization is on the Enterprise plan.
• You don't have an existing cluster which you prefer to use.
• Your cluster only needs to be used for a Self-hosted Retool deployment.
• You don't want to manage the cluster directly.
• You have a single or multi-instance Retool deployment, where each instance requires its own namespace.

Retool admins can enable Retool-managed Temporal. To get started, navigate to the Retool Workflows page and click Enroll now. Once you update your configuration, return to the page and click Complete setup.

Initializing namespace in Retool-managed Temporal

It can take a few minutes to initialize a namespace in Retool-managed Temporal.

Retool-managed Temporal clusters are hosted on Temporal Cloud. Your Self-hosted Retool deployment communicates with the cluster when building, deploying, and executing Retool Workflows. All orchestration data to Temporal is fully encrypted and uses the private encryption key set for your deployment.

Self-managed cluster

Temporal Cloud

If you want to create a new, self-hosted cluster on Temporal Cloud, sign up first. Once your account is provisioned, you can then deploy Self-hosted Retool.

Temporal Cloud supports 10+ AWS regions from which to select, 99.99% availability, and 99.9% guarantee against service errors.

You should use an existing self-managed cluster, hosted on Temporal Cloud or in your own infrastructure, if:

• You cannot use a Retool-managed cluster.
• You are on a version greater than 3.6.14.
• Your organization is on the Free, Team, or Business plan.
• You have an existing cluster and would prefer to use another namespace within it.
• You need a cluster for uses other than a Self-hosted Retool deployment.
• You want to manage the cluster directly.
• You have a multi-instance Retool deployment, where each instance would have its own namespace in a shared Self-hosted Temporal cluster.

Self-managed cluster considerations

Retool recommends using a separate datastore for the Workflows Queue in production. Consider using AWS Aurora Serverless V2 configured to an ACU (cpu) provision ranging from 0.5 to 8 ACU. 1 ACU can provide around 10 QPS. The Workflows Queue is write-heavy (around 100:1 write to read operations) and Aurora Serverless can scale to accommodate spikes in traffic without any extra configuration.

Environments

For test environments, Retool recommends using the same database for the Retool Database and Workflows Queue. Without any extra configuration, Retool Workflows can process approximately 5-10 QPS (roughly, 5-10 concurrent blocks executed per second).

Workflows at scale

You can scale Self-hosted Retool Workflow-related services to perform a high rate of concurrent blocks per second. If your deployment needs to process more than 10 workflows per second, you can use:

• A Retool-managed cluster.
• A self-managed cluster on Temporal Cloud.
• Apache Cassandra as the Temporal datastore.

If you anticipate running workflows at a higher scale, please reach out to us to work through a deployment strategy that is best for your use case.

Local cluster

You should spin up a new cluster alongside your Self-hosted Retool instance if:

• You cannot use a Retool-managed cluster.
• You are on a version greater than 3.6.14.
• Your organization is on the Free, Team, or Business plan.
• You don't have an existing cluster to use.
• You don't need a cluster for uses other than a Self-hosted Retool deployment.
• You want to test a Self-hosted Retool deployment with a local cluster first.
• You have a multi-instance Retool deployment, but each instance is in its own VPC and requires its own Self-hosted Temporal cluster.

Local cluster considerations

Retool recommends using a separate datastore for the Workflows Queue in production. Consider using AWS Aurora Serverless V2 configured to an ACU (cpu) provision ranging from 0.5 to 8 ACU. 1 ACU can provide around 10 QPS. The Workflows Queue is write-heavy (around 100:1 write to read operations) and Aurora Serverless can scale to accommodate spikes in traffic without any extra configuration.

Environments

For test environments, Retool recommends using the same database for the Retool Database and Workflows Queue. Without any extra configuration, Retool Workflows can process approximately 5-10 QPS (roughly, 5-10 concurrent blocks executed per second).

Workflows at scale

You can scale Self-hosted Retool Workflow-related services to perform a high rate of concurrent blocks per second. If your deployment needs to process more than 10 workflows per second, you can use:

• A Retool-managed cluster.
• A self-managed cluster on Temporal Cloud.
• Apache Cassandra as the Temporal datastore.

If you anticipate running workflows at a higher scale, please reach out to us to work through a deployment strategy that is best for your use case.

1. Create a Linux VM instance

Create a new Linux VM in the Google Cloud console that meets the minimum requirements. Refer to the Google Cloud documentation to learn how to create a new virtual machine.

VM setting	Description
Network	Configure the VM to allow HTTP and HTTPS traffic.
Storage	Specify SSD persistent with a size that meets or exceeds the minimum requirements.

Once the VM is initialized, download the private key when prompted. Update the permissions of the key-pair to ensure it has the required permissions for your SSH client.

chmod 400 <path_to_pem_file>

2. Download Self-hosted Retool

GCP automatically runs the new virtual machine once created. Once the new Linux VM is ready, use the Google Cloud console to connect using SSH.

Download or clone the retool-on-premise GitHub repository.

Download with curl

curl -L -O https://github.com/tryretool/retool-onpremise/archive/master.zip \
&& unzip master.zip \
&& cd retool-onpremise-master

Clone with git

git clone https://github.com/tryretool/retool-onpremise.git

3. Install Docker dependencies

Run ./install.sh to prepare the Docker image. The script also installs Docker and Docker Compose if they are not already available.

4. Back up encryption key

The install script generates a value for ENCRYPTION_KEY and stores it within docker.env. This key encrypts secrets for your Retool resources. Save this key in a secure location outside of Retool.

Encryption key cannot be recovered

You will need to reconfigure all resources if the encryption key is lost.

5. Configure deployment

There are four files to configure for your deployment:

File	Description
docker.env	Environment variables to control or override certain deployment options.
docker-compose.yml	The Docker Compose configuration to use for the deployment.
Dockerfile	The standard configuration file for Retool's Docker image.
CodeExecutor.Dockerfile	The Dockerfile for the code executor Docker image.

Specify the version of Retool to use

In the Dockerfile, specify the Docker tag for the version of Retool to install, such as tryretool/backend:3.33-stable.

In CodeExecutor.Dockerfile, specify the Docker tag for the version of the code executor service to install. This should be the same as the version you specify in the Dockerfile.

Avoid using latest

Specify the exact version to use, such as 3.33-stable. This ensures you know exactly which version will be deployed.

Prepare Compose file

Retool provides two Docker Compose files from which to choose, depending on the Temporal cluster you will use:

Compose file	Temporal cluster type	Configuration
docker-compose.yml	Retool-managed or self-managed	Preconfigured for use with a Retool-managed cluster and ready to use.
docker-compose-with-temporal.yml	Local	Delete docker-compose.yml and rename docker-compose-with-temporal.yml to docker-compose.yml. You must also copy the dynamicconfig directory in retool-onpremise onto your deployment instance.

Retool-managed cluster

Allow your deployment to connect to Temporal

Open up egress to the public internet on ports 443 and 7233 to allow outbound-only connections to Temporal Cloud from your deployment. This allows Workflows workers to pick up work and the Workflows backend to enqueue work on Temporal Cloud.

Your deployment must be able to connect through the public internet connection as Temporal Cloud does not have a static IP range.

Self-managed cluster

Follow the steps for configuring either a Temporal Cloud cluster or a self-hosted cluster in your VPC.

Temporal Cloud

Allow your deployment to connect to Temporal

Open up egress to the public internet on ports 443 and 7233 to allow outbound-only connections to Temporal Cloud from your deployment. This allows Workflows workers to pick up work and the Workflows backend to enqueue work on Temporal Cloud.

Your deployment must be able to connect through the public internet connection as Temporal Cloud does not have a static IP range.

Configure environment variables for Temporal cluster

Set the following environment variables for the MAIN_BACKEND, WORKFLOW_BACKEND, and WORKFLOW_TEMPORAL_WORKER services in the configuration file.

mTLS required for Temporal Cloud

Temporal Cloud requires security certificates for secure access.

Variable	Description
WORKFLOW_TEMPORAL_CLUSTER_NAMESPACE	The namespace in your Temporal cluster for each Retool deployment you have (e.g., retool-prod). Default is workflows.
WORKFLOW_TEMPORAL_CLUSTER_FRONTEND_HOST	The frontend host of the cluster.
WORKFLOW_TEMPORAL_CLUSTER_FRONTEND_PORT	The port with which to connect. Default is 7233.
WORKFLOW_TEMPORAL_TLS_ENABLED	Whether to enable mTLS. Set to true.
WORKFLOW_TEMPORAL_TLS_CRT	The base64-encoded mTLS certificate.
WORKFLOW_TEMPORAL_TLS_KEY	The base64-encoded mTLS key.

Self-hosted

PostgreSQL permissions

If you use a PostgreSQL database as a persistence store, the PostgreSQL user must have permissions to CREATE DATABASE. If this is not possible, you can manually create the required databases in your PostgreSQL cluster: temporal and temporal_visibility.

Configure environment variables for Temporal cluster

Set the following environment variables for MAIN_BACKEND and WORKFLOW_TEMPORAL_WORKER services, if not already configured.

Variable	Description
WORKFLOW_TEMPORAL_CLUSTER_NAMESPACE	The namespace in your Temporal cluster for each Retool deployment you have (e.g., retool-prod). Default is workflows.
WORKFLOW_TEMPORAL_CLUSTER_FRONTEND_HOST	The frontend host of the Temporal cluster.
WORKFLOW_TEMPORAL_CLUSTER_FRONTEND_PORT	The port with which to connect to the Temporal cluster. Defaults to 7233.
WORKFLOW_TEMPORAL_TLS_ENABLED	(Optional) Whether to enable mTLS.
WORKFLOW_TEMPORAL_TLS_CRT	(Optional) The base64-encoded mTLS certificate.
WORKFLOW_TEMPORAL_TLS_KEY	(Optional) The base64-encoded mTLS key.

Local cluster

Use the default values in the configuration.

Set license key and disable SSL

Configure the following environment variables in docker.env:

Variable	Value	Description
LICENSE_KEY	Your Self-hosted Retool license key.	The license key obtained from the Self-hosted Portal.
COOKIE_INSECURE	true	Allows you to use Self-hosted Retool without SSL. This variable is included in docker.env for you to uncomment.

Update configuration when enabling SSL

Once you configure SSL, set COOKIE_INSECURE to false.

6. Start the instance

Run sudo docker-compose up -d to start Self-hosted Retool. This can take several minutes as the instance performs the initial setup and starts its services for the first time.

Once running, Self-hosted Retool is available at http://<your-gcp-ip-address>/auth/signup. When you first visit the page, you must create an admin account.

You can check whether Docker containers are running with sudo docker-compose ps.

Additional configuration

When deploying a production instance of Self-hosted Retool, you should:

• Externalize your PostgreSQL database to a managed service.
• Set up SSL on your deployment.
• Keep the instance up-to-date.

For ease of use and as a proof of concept, the default docker-compose configuration includes a PostgreSQL container, and it does not set up SSL. This is not suitable for production use cases, and you should host the Retool storage database on an external, managed database. Managed databases are more maintainable, scalable, and reliable than containerized PostgreSQL instances. Follow the instructions in the external storage database guide to configure your database.

Setting environment variables is also often necessary to configure SSO, source control, and other self-hosted features. See the environment variable reference for additional configuration options.

Update your Google Compute Engine instance

Follow these instructions to update your Retool instance to a newer release version.

Back up the instance before performing an update

Retool strongly recommends that you back up the VM before performing an update. If you cannot complete a full backup, you should at least:

• Create a snapshot of your PostgreSQL database.
• Copy the environment variables in docker.env to a secure location outside of Retool.

To update your deployment to a newer version of Self-hosted Retool:

1. Update the Dockerfile and CodeExecutor.Dockerfile with the newer version number. For example:
   • tryretool/backend:3.33.10-stable
   • tryretool/code-executor-service:3.33.10-stable
2. Run ./update_retool.sh to perform the update.

The Retool instance is temporarily stopped while the update takes place and restarts automatically. Retool recommends performing the upgrade during off-peak hours to minimize downtime for users.