Cloudron Community App Store - Publish your app

[james]

Hello Everyone

It has been some time since we introduced the community app support.
Until now, we have manually curated community apps in the Community Apps topic.

Now you can publish your community apps directly here: https://ca.cloudron.io/.

You need a cloudron.io account to log in and publish your apps.

The source code for the app store is at https://git.cloudron.io/apps/community-store . PRs welcome if you want any enhancements .

[girish]

To add, any one can submit to the community app store and submissions are not vetted by the Cloudron team or "managed" by us. We are just providing a way for the community to discover each other's apps. That's about it. We don't want to be part of the submission flow. We think that would defeat the purpose of allowing people to list and install any app they see fit.

[fbartels]

@james said:

https://git.cloudron.io/apps/community-store

There still seem to be some permissions missing. Even after logging into the Cloudron Gitlab I only get a 404 for this project.

[timconsidine]

@james thank you for this - big step forward.

I can't log in but maybe that's my stupidness / old passwords (but I am logged in elsewhere)
Password manager issue - logged in.
Cool !

[timconsidine]

@james will you be closing/trashing the 'old' forum category for community apps ?

[timconsidine]

@james congratulations & thank you for a very slick app addition flow. Just the CloudronVersions.json link. I was fearing lots of forms. Very nice

[Lanhild]

@fbartels I concur

[james]

Hello @fbartels and @lanhild
You need to be signed in to view the repository currently.
But this is just the source code for the app store.

[james]

Hello @timconsidine

@timconsidine said:

will you be closing/trashing the 'old' forum category for community apps ?

No to the category, yes to the topic listing all community apps.
That is the idea so we don't have to maintain that topic any further.

[Lanhild]

@james Yeah, I do know that. Though, it seems like there are some misconfigured privacy settings, as the URL you provided returns a 404, while signed in.

[james]

Hello @Lanhild
Thanks for pointing this out. I have adjusted the permissions and now it should work.

[girish]

I made a fix now to make the listing show the packager* fields from the manifest (and not based on the OIDC login). The OIDC login is "private" and was used by mistake.

[fbartels]

I see that store is already starting to fill up. I think the individual app listing could use an entry to the source code of the app. Currently the links to website/documentation often go to the upstream projects.

Some apps, for example https://ca.cloudron.io/app/matrix-whatsapp-bridge, use the author field to link to a source repo.

Maybe instead of the "contact" value

[girish]

We can use packagerUrl for linking the source repo. I don't think people creating websites for packages anyway. I will adjust the pages to show this link separately. And the contact email can be a link to the packagerName.

[timconsidine]

As the list builds (already doing so), it will become not so easy to identify additions. I am wondering if there are some simple hacks that can be applied :

• show a total of number of apps listed (user : oh, it was 31, now it's 33, let me check what was added)
• optional sort by updated date instead of alphabetical (not to monitor whether an installed app update is needed, just to see what is new/changed)

I would like to emphasise the word SIMPLE. I don't want to suggest complex work. The page works really nicely as it is.

[girish]

@timconsidine done, added a basic filter and app count as well

[robi]

@girish Can you wrap or proxy the ca.cloudron.io store just like you do the appstore for every cloudron?

This would allow for no copy-pasting the versions file manually, and have a button-click install for community apps that are registered.

Thoughts?

[jdaviescoates]

This is great, but please could the packager name link to their user profile in this forum.

Or add an additional link to the relevant user profile on this forum (where one exists).

And ideally pull in any forum badges "App Dev" "Translater" etc too.

And possibly their forum "reputation" score too.

And their Cloudron forum join date.

Basically as much extra info as possible that helps people gauge a little more how experienced, reliable and invested in the Cloudron ecosystem they are.

Oh, and also and Added on date above or below the Updated on field.

Personally I'll not sure about the packager links going to email. As a packager I wouldn't necessarily want my email there. As a user I'd personally much prefer to contact them on here, either via a chat DM or in an appropriate forum thread.

[girish]

@jdaviescoates I think the email is not great as well. Previously, we had some vague fields like contactEmail and author. I have deprecated these now. I have gone ahead and added packageUrl (as @fbartels suggested, which can be say some github repo or some package website) . There is also packagerUrl (extra 'r'!) which can be a link to I guess the user's forum entry.

Now, to tie in form reputation/badges etc is out of scope for the moment for the community store. I think if people fill up the packagerUrl correctly, this can be determined by the end user. But let's see, these new fields require Cloudron 10 first and then the community app authors to fill in the field. Happy to accept future contributions for getting reputation etc.

(We also didn't want the community store to have profile fields like forum url etc intentionally i.e fields outside the versions and manifest fields. This would break the whole decentralization aspect if we have to maintain all this in a central place).

[timconsidine]

ooops

You have reached the maximum number of apps.

Please sir, can I have some more ?
(after Oliver Twist)