What is Reddit's opinion of Cloudron?

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

Thanks for posting this already, we just published the official blog post for 1.0: https://cloudron.io/blog/2017-06-20-cloudron-1.0.0.html

Let us know what you think, my co-founder and me had a great journey the last 2 years building this!

I use Cloudron and love it, it's some of the best few dollars I spend every month. There's a pretty decent array of apps available, good documentation on how to create apps of your own that you can then publish, and it comes built in with an email server including aliases and unlimited '+' emails.

Something like Cloudron? Not affiliated, just a big fan, and also helped package some apps for the platform. There's a great community around it on the forums and chat. It's BYOB (Bring Your Own Box), but the app install/App Store is as easy as it gets.

The simplest way would be paying for a service for them to host it for you, something like https://cloudron.io/ (I don't have any experience using them, it's just one I heard that exists, there are definitely others). I believe it can automatically install Nextcloud as well, which is basically an alternative to Dropbox. Nextcloud supports end to end encryption as well. While it may take more setup, you can also host it yourself for free, which is what I do, on an old laptop or desktop computer that always needs to be supplied an internet connection and power. Hope this helps! You can also checkout r/selfhosted.

I use the mail server that comes with Cloudron on Digital Ocean. With Cloudron, I use the Amazon SES relay. This makes it relay all emails via SES. I have got good results with relaying as opposed to sending it directly from a droplet.

Edit: Found some docs at https://cloudron.io/documentation/email/#relaying-outbound-mails

While Cloudron will introduce paid plans for the service of automatic updates and support, where the free version only allows currently 2 apps, it is still a normal AGPL project and you can get the platform as well as the apps directly from git. We currently prepare some more documentation on that as it is not entirely clear for the users.

Even if you install and use Cloudron today with the approach outlined at https://cloudron.io/references/selfhosting.html once 1.0 lands you will be able to choose to go with the manual entierly free approach then. The main drawbacks of this will be that updates won't be automatic and there won't be any professional support provided.

For those looking into selfhosting, email, docs, blogs and the like, look into Cloudron.io. Just install the platform on a VPS or your basement and then install any of the apps from https://cloudron.io/store/index.html. They then push updates to your server continuously via their App Store (very similar to how phones work today).

I think ultimately the solution depends on whether you want to "manage" apps yourself or not i.e figure out how to install apps, how to keep them updated etc. If you are all about hands on and have time to sink, I think Portainer/Rancher is an option.

Personally, I use Cloudron. I have most of the apps I want from there and don't use a single SaaS service other than Cloudron.

Did you want me to comment on anything specific, am happy to answer?

I am a NextCloud user and would recommend it. But my demands of a personal cloud are far more than what nextcloud can offer - email, vpn, blogs etc. I use Cloudron for running all this because I also like the idea of "spreading" all my stuff across many apps instead of relying on one app. Like I said, I like nextcloud but I am also wary of using it with all the rss, notes apps that are really 3rd party apps which are not officially supported. And I also don't completely understand why they make a file sharing app into this mess of apps, seems like a security nightmare (but that's just my 2c). It's like installing all sorts of plugins into wordpress (which i also hate).

For security, https://cloudron.io/documentation/security/ is a good overview on what you want to have (whether you use cloudron or not).

We use this on cloudron. https://cloudron.io/store/org.mailtrain.cloudronapp.html. The outbound in cloudron can be configured to mailgun to deliver ability.

Mailtrain does it's job but the newsletter editor is very buggy and error prone. The mailtrain api is also not completely finished, so cannot integrate with a WordPress sign up form.

> I love the idea of a way for someone to go "sign up", it automatically starts up the necessary VPS environment, and then just add a few accounts and all the services "just work".

Did you check Cloudron managed hosting? https://cloudron.io/managed.html

If you are not in for the tinkering part, and at some point would like to run more apps on that server, you could give https://cloudron.io/get.html#selfhost a try. It would take care automatically of the SSL certs as well as keeping your containers up-to-date.

The whole current app catalog for Cloudron can be seen at https://cloudron.io/store/index.html All those will be installable in parallel on the same Cloudron/server with a few clicks. The limit is of course, as mentioned here in many other comments, the available resources of the underlying server.

Installing Cloudron (https://cloudron.io) would give you Nextcloud and TTRSS pretty easily (one click install). I've had good luck with it so far. As for chat, they either have something like Rocket.Chat or Mattermost - or if your preferred chat runs on a lamp stack Cloudron can install that, too.

The docs are indeed still quite lacking, due to time constraint on our side. However, there is a rather minimalist LAMP app in the store, we will provide app templates for other stacks like LEMP, MEAN, ... in the future. Those are generally quite easy to do with our developer tooling and we could use help from people with more experience on the individual stacks and corresponding work-flows.

Regarding the isolation, Cloudron uses docker to isolate every app instance from one another. Also the Cloudron has a built-in user management, which allows fine grained access control on a group or per-user basis. All apps additionally run in a read-only filesystem with an optionally mounted writeable folder. Besides security, this also is required to ensure correct backups without backing up the actual application code base together with the data. This is part of the addon story, which allows to share common resources like databases, while keeping them isolated. See here https://cloudron.io/references/addons.html

For the email part, you are correct about the email sending capabilities wrt the apps, but (albeit not yet fully advertised on the website) the platform also optionally comes with a whole email server setup, including imap, sieve, smtp, spamassasin, webmail clients...

Can't say much about the use and setup complexity from your perspective, but it certainly is one of our main goals to make exactly this part as straight forwards as possible. You might have to install it on a server to see if our current approach is roughly in-line with what you have in mind. Either way, I would be curious about your views on this.

Just to be clear, I posted this in order to avoid duplicate efforts on both ends, in case your vision matches ours. After re-reading your initial post, I am not sure now, if you had more of a paas in mind :-)

Hi, you might want to take a look at https://cloudron.io which aims in a similar direction and is also fully open source. It is mostly written in Nodejs though. We also set out to solve our own needs first with regards to simplify server management and hosting web services.

We already have several freelancers and small teams who do use Cloudron to host webapps and other services for their clients.

I used cloudron.io, cloudflare dns service Free Tier, and installed Ubuntu 20.04 with all Updates and then added Jellyfin through cloudron control panel (my.domain.com) once all that was setup and it connected my domain to it with http & https and I did not have to add it manually. Six full resets before I got it right and found cloudron.io

Thats funny you ask I am using a

MacPro 2006
4 gigs of Ram
Boot Drive of 500gb
ReFiend Boot Loader
Additional Drives for TV Shows of 4TB (Internal)
Films and Wrestling on an additional 500gb (Internal)
Ubuntu 20.04
Cloudron.io
Jellyfin Media Server Addon from their Repository

I use Hand Brake & Free MP4 Converter (MacOS Big Sur) to convert all my shows and movies to either .mp4 or .m4v (Hand Brake does that)

From My Laptop (to the server) I Use FTP Software to SFTP into the server (which has no screen or keyboard attached except when needed) and I send the files to the appropriate Folder and HD.

Every TV Show Has Its Own Category Folder, TV Show Folder and Season Sub Folder
ex /Drama/Grey's Anatomy/Season 18/ or /Animated/The Simpsons/Season 30/

Every Movie Has Its own Category Folder and Film Folder
/Animated/The Simpsons Movie (2007) / or /Sci-Fi/Back To The Future (1985)

This is how I have setup and got working my Jellyfin Server. This was after six full reinstalls of Linux trying Ubunu 20.04, and Linux Mint 20.04

If you have any questions you can message me anytime

Hello,

I also have MacPro 2006 server using Linux Ubuntu 20.04 and Cloudron.io with Jellyfin added and I first use a program like Hand Brake for all systems and Free MP4 Converter on MacOS Big Sur and have converted all non-mp4 downloaded files (.mkv, .avi, wmv) to mp4 using one of the two programs. Then from the laptop I SFTP them into my server in the proper file naming and folder (show --> Season) and then rescan the Library for the new episodes and then check them to make sure they are correct.

I found that I had to install a webserver so I used Cloudron.io and install there software with nginx and then once that was working I used there system to install jellyfin and then tried it at my mothers with my domain matthewdykstra.xyz and it worked from a Bell Internet Connection to a Teksavvy connection at my house in Whitby, Ontario, Canada so you might want to try doing that

This may be more convoluted than you wish, but you could rent a VPS (avoid GoDaddy), and install Cloudron.io on it, which is a VPS manager. The free tier gets you two apps - Easy Appointments, and Invoice Ninja. The former is quite handy with scheduling, and the latter is just super with billing (as well as the other finance needs you mentioned). Both would not need a super powerful VPS.

If you want more of an all-in-one option, on the same VPS + Cloudron you could install just Nextcloud. Then you could add apps as needed from with Nextcloud - Talk, OnlyOffice, appointments, Tasks, etc. But this would require a more powerful VPS (at least 4GB ram, preferably more).

Another route using your own VPS and Cloudron would be to install Wordpress and use its various plugins. The downside to this is potential security problems related to too many plugins in a WP site. This would likely be cheaper than $50/month, assuming you found an afforable and reliable VPS + Cloudron yearly payment (For VPS, I use ssdnodes, racknerds, wishosting, and ethernetservers.com)

This is all self-hosted stuff though, so you probably want to spend more of your time teaching and prepping course content than managing all this. Your question makes me wonder how many others like you are out there, and whether my suggested approach might be useful, _as long as someone else manages it_.

I found links in your comment that were not hyperlinked:

• cloudron.io

I did the honors for you.

^delete ^| ^information ^| ^<3

The one single answer to your question is cloudron.io. serious. Don't even bother with anything else. Pony up for the Prem plan, and you have ALL that you need, even the email! For only 15/month. Based on your description I'm so certain this is perfect for you that I'm adding my affiliate link, which I've never used before, so that we both get $30 credit. But I also love cloudron.io so much I don't even care if you sign up without my link. You'll be forever glad!! https://cloudron.io/?refcode=1d0bc470b111efb9

I found links in your comment that were not hyperlinked:

• cloudron.io

I did the honors for you.

^delete ^| ^information ^| ^<3

Cloudron also has a built-in email solution and a few webmailers as apps to install. It will also guide you with the required DNS record setup or depending in the name server you use may even set those up automatically.

Since you are keen to just jump right in, why not install Cloudron.io? The free plan offers only a few apps, but it doesn't seem like you want tons anyway. And then you can get productive, rather than fiddling with things here and there. If you really want to ttry to learn more than just install an Ubuntu server image with vmware or virtualbox and practice on that, locally.

Quick reply:

3) Yes, this is a pain, but non-american players (5-eyes, cloud-act etc.) is important for our customers
4) No, we are mostly two tech-people, but cloudron (https://cloudron.io/) makes it super-efficient

Mostly ecommerce & ERP/accounting - but I've come to be very frustrated with all SaaS that isn't open-source for the effective "until death do us part" data and migration-costs lockin.

Wordpress & Advanced Custom Fields was the closest I could get to a FOSS Rapid DB Dev tool but overkill for a lot of things and doesn't support Custom Tables without a lot of risks. In fact I've ended up doing a lot of scoping with GSheets for the sake of speed.

Directus looks perfect for quickly designing and iterating relational DB structures to either use with it as the interface as well or use the SQL in another app.

Prob the first thing I'll do is a quick Bookmark Manager tool and prob an HR app as a couple of quick wins for relatively simple data that is often collaborated on among our team.

The whole JAMstack movement is very interesting, so be looking at marrying Directus with maybe Gatsby/Hugo/Jekyll. Strapi looks worth a further look as well but all the similar-but-slightly-different abundance of choice there now seems to be does mean a lot more up-front research before making choices.

Sponsoring a dev to build a Cloudron package for Directus as well to quickly fire up and play with instances and then look at building some more of the common JAMstack packages on Cloudron - because frankly, time is precious and you can't save more time than with a one-button containerised build (& destroy).

I found links in your comment that were not hyperlinked:

• cloudron.io

I did the honors for you.

^delete ^| ^information ^| ^<3

Then I suggest to self host your mailserver. I use https://cloudron.io on a server at home (https://cloudron.io/documentation/email/) and relay emails through my domain provider. All mails are on my server, encrypted backups are in the cloud. Synology is another option, etc. etc.

DigitalOcean is by far the cheapest and most reliable. It's $5/month for their droplet, but if you're not seasoned in managing your own server then give Cloudron a try: https://cloudron.io/. Cloudron is free for up to two apps, and can be installed from DigitalOcean's dashboard. A great no cost solution (as long as you don't run more than two sites) and they will handle the Ghost install, future updates, patches, etc.

Not that I have noticed. I actually use cloudron.io with the 24GB RAM VPS, running 10 apps including chat, mail, wordpress, etc., and it all is fine. You might find complaints from me online, mostly Help-related, but once they had the communication working it was better. However, what with the 20+ hosts going out of business (over at the lowendtalk.com forums), you never know!

If you intend to get a small VPS to host everything, you can also checkout Cloudron's built-in email solution: https://cloudron.io/documentation/email/

Given the free tier you can also get a webmailer going easily like rainloop or roundcube and possibly some card/cal-dav app on top to hook into.

There are several attempts at doing that already (apart from the solutions already mentioned in this thread there is also Yunohost and Cloudron, my experiences with the first are already some years old, but I use Cloudron nor for quite a while already).

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The challenge here is to deliver a package that automates most (if not all) for the average user. So action like backup & installing new apps, updating existing apps, updating the platform itself should be done automatically. This is imho something that is nicely done within Cloudron.

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https://cloudron.io/

In your case I would recommend to try if DO spaces works for you. You can set it up following the docs at https://cloudron.io/documentation/backups/#digitalocean-spaces

cloudron.io is able to get ghost blogs up and running, they have a free tier, and I've found it super easy to use. Depending on your VPS you could run a few awesome apps in addition to the Ghost app for the price of your VPS. I liked the app selection better than Serverpilot, and I guess Runcloud since Cloudron uses Docker to run all kinds of apps.

Check out Cloudron, I'm pretty sure it fulfills most of your requirements. It's very easy to use, it's open source, there's a paid plan (15$/mo) as well as a free plan with some limitations.

• you invite users by sending them a unique link. I'm pretty sure the link expires after a while, maybe 24h
• it has a central user/app management
• most apps support using common credentials. Usually you still have to enter them separately for each app though
• I think most of the apps you're looking for are available, plus in the next version of Cloudron (supposed be released in a matter of weeks, if not days) it's supposed be possible to install regular Docker containers (almost any web app is available as a Docker container, but it won't be integrated with common credentials etc)

Hey :)

Okay so after reading the install instructions on https://cloudron.io/references/selfhosting.html I think I figured it out.

You're missing one DNS record. Cloudron requires a wildcard A record pointing to the IP address of your machine/node. So, in your DNS settings put a new record that points *.domain.tld to your server's IP address.

By the way, you should remove all the other DNS records and only keeping your @ and * records. Don't keep the my subdomain because cloudron wants to control dns itself.

Also, just make sure your DNS has propagated before trying anything, or just setup a resolver locally so you can check your stuff quicker, by checking using this: https://www.whatsmydns.net

Tell me how it goes by replying to this comment instead of the main post, that way we can get notified :)

Thanks for your detailed post. I very much agree with your buckets of users (maybe a third one for pure tinkerers could be seen).

To put this in perspective, our project's long term vision is that installing apps on a server should be as easy as it is currently on your phone. Of course we have a long way to go. Currently we cater to both groups of people, this is by simply looking at our users, but those are in for different reasons. Some as you say just want this and that app up and running quickly, and have no clue about technicalities. For the second group we basically just save time and the project can be viewed as a sysadmin automation project.

For us the main value add is not really about the installation only, but installation is really only the first step which. Running apps on a server is a lot more, as people probably know here, it has to be kept updated, data migration has to happen, backups have to be taken, DNS has to be setup....so this is really I think the "services in between" where we see Cloudron fit into and what we try to tackle.

> I had a look at https://cloudron.io/blog/2017-02-27-lamp.html - it sounds like you're a fairly normal shared host, but with the addition of Let's Encrypt and a custom control panel?

Perfect, that was our aim to make those people comfortable. However as you see with all the other apps, they are handled in a pre-packaged containerized format.

I am also asking here, to gain more perspective on the groups of people provisioning servers and maintaining apps there, so I can't give you good answers about the market size and segmentation. Clearly since we get happy users from various, there appears to be a market, now what I am not sure about is, if the market segments are historically so different when it comes to "run a piece of software on a server" or if they really have to be distinct groups also in the long run.