Cloudron 3.6 - new plans

[girish]

Hi Guys,
A change in plans for 3.6. We have a large influx of users who are coming from the plesk/cpanel world and the common issues they are facing are:

• Wordpress code is not "editable"
• No FTP access to Wordpress
• Migrating existing sites into Cloudron is a pain (because most of the WP ecosystem relies on wordpress code being editable)

So, we decided to hold other features a bit and tackle these specific issues first.

Our plan is:

• Have two Wordpress packages - Managed and Unmanaged. The current wordpress app we have is 'Managed' where updates are automatic and wordpress code itself cannot be changed. The new one will be 'Unmanaged', where you can edit the code and handle updates to wordpress yourself. Specifically, the 'unmanaged' one is what you want if you want to use something like ManageWP or wp-staging etc. These plugins require the code to be "editable".

• Add SFTP support at the platform level across all apps. This way you can upload media to other apps as well. Currently, the LAMP app has SFTP built into it, but we will remove it because you can now do this at the platform level.

Comments/suggestions, welcome!

[murgero]

@girish Why not have them use LAMP, which is what this was made for? Leave the current Wordpress as is, and not make another one. No one is stopping them from using common sense and installing Wordpress in the COMPLETELY OPEN LAMP Stack app..

Though adding SFTP to all apps would be nice. I am in the process of building a Plex app that would completely benefit from this for users.

EDIT: Also, the ability to add custom environment variables in CloudronManifest.json AND the Web UI would be very nice for custom apps.

[girish]

@murgero Yes, we are debating about how we should go about the managed/unmanaged wp internally as well. As you said, the unmanaged app is really just a fork of lamp app that pre-installs wp. It's just for ease of use and nothing else. Talking to a whole bunch of customers what we found is many of them don't know what LAMP even means... Maybe that apps' title has to be changed a bit since only devs understand what LAMP stands for.

Plex+SFTP yes! We also have Emby which is not published for which it will be useful. We thought of adding SFTP to WP app itself but the confusion here was that each app has to have different SFTP port. Instead we decided to have it at platform level where people can login as <username>@<appname> (have to have this format because many SFTP clients do not support virtual host it seems).

For the env var section, can you tell me the use case? In the past, we just made a UI for each app (like the openvpn, minecraft, collabora apps).

[murgero]

@girish SFTP on linux supports virtual directories though, one hostname, many dirs.

So something like

SFTP://username@example.com:

/
/app1
/app2
/app3
/app4

And this would probably be easier to handle internally too. it also fixes the virtual hosts for different SFTP clients issues.

As for the ability to change Environment Vars via Cloudron UI or Manifest would allow devs and users alike to change stuff without modifying an apps configuration which can be overwritten with an update (like apache.conf as one example).

This can also allow more apps to come in (Like plex which relies on env vars for directories and such). It doesn't need to be for all apps, but a developer might want to enable it in some cases.

[nebulon]

@murgero thanks for your suggestion, we have thought of creating folders for each user with symlinks to the accessible app data directories. Can you explain a bit further what you mean with the virtual directory support in SFTP servers? We currently use proftpd with app data directory be handled over as an LDAP attribute and set as the root dir for the sftp connection.

[murgero]

@nebulon

Sorry my lingo is old, in this case symlink == Virtual Dir.

[ruihildt]

@murgero said in Cloudron 3.6 - new plans:

@girish Why not have them use LAMP, which is what this was made for? Leave the current Wordpress as is, and not make another one. No one is stopping them from using common sense and installing Wordpress in the COMPLETELY OPEN LAMP Stack app..

The promise of Cloudron is to have one-click install app. It's a better version of Plesk+Softaculous.

In this regard -and with Wordpress is the most popular app on Cloudron- having a Wordpress unmanaged app is good to have. Cloudron could attract a lot of users from these platforms and make life easier to a lot of webdevs/users.

in terms of Cloudron experience, I think it would be good to only have one "Wordpress" in the appstore, and have then the managed/unmanaged choice coming up at install time. (which would create actually 3 choices, managed LDAP / Managed non-LDAP/ Unmanaged)

As for SFTP support, I'm looking forward to it.

[hiyukoim]

Probably I'm too late to reply to this topic, but I'm also looking forward to seeing SFTP for each application.
I need SFTP access mainly for WordPress and ghost for theme tweaks and updates.
For the moment, I use Transmit app and login with VPS root just for updating theme files.
So it would be great if I can use app-specific SFTP for security.

(There's already unmanaged Wordpress, but I like the managed WordPress app which separates Wordpress core from theme and plugins. )