Caprover... mysterious fails - Cloudron just works!

[girish]

@marcusquinn said in Caprover... mysterious fails - Cloudron just works!:

Sounds like the parallel need is attracting more "ultra technical" wizards to assist, or somehow incentivising the app authors themselves to adopt the maintenance as part of their release testing. Tell us what you need - you have a community here for a reason, and there are many that want to help in whatever way they can.

There is a general neglect of deployment and upgrades in the market which is far beyond cloudron. It's probably not apparent here (in the forum), but we regularly report bugs upstream where basic things like login doesn't work after a release.

Part of the issue is that in most projects the upstream deployment strategies are "automated" and nobody is really looking into what it built. There are no tests, I am yet to encounter a project which has proper UI and deployment tests. This is mostly why we are having to do this I remember trying to upstream tests in our early days but the issue was that the tests are tied to Cloudron.

There is also a lack of understanding of how deployments has to be done in a maintainable way. Many projects have plugins/extensions and I am yet to understand how people update things properly when they use plugins. The recent n8n/immich etc even start writing in code directories (probably bugs, but we have to investigate each thing and report upstream).

[robi]

@girish said in Caprover... mysterious fails - Cloudron just works!:

There is also a lack of understanding of how deployments has to be done in a maintainable way.

Have you come across a good guide that one could share more easily with the project maintainers?

Many are asking for feedback and not getting the right kind, and they also don't know any better to go looking on their own.

[girish]

@robi Closest I have come across is https://12factor.net/ which I think is from the Heroku folks. That document largely inspires how we do deployments as well.

[robi]

@girish That's more for SaaS apps and not detailed enough for what the devs you're dealing with need.

So we need a deployment guide, perhaps specific to Github, that takes it a few steps further than the mere setup of the automation that makes it feel done.

The guide on tests and automation is another beast I think, needing a separate resource covering deployments and perhaps another for UIs as that's a whole other layer of QA after deployment.

Maintainability is yet another guide which gets specific to the project, yet is easier if the above two are already addressed sufficiently.

So that's at least 3 separate resources to share so far.

Here's what I found so far:

1. Deployment Guide
2. Tests and Automation
3. Deployment maintainability could best be approached from your viewpoint which would reflect the needs of Cloudron, and hence suggest you write a few thoughts there and publish it so you can stop repeating yourself

[zonzonzon]

I use both Caprover and Cloudron simultaneously, but honestly, Cloudron operates more stably. Caprover is quite difficult when installing many applications and allocating resources, and backup is not intuitive. All of that is available in Cloudron, the updates are timely and stability is high, support is quick even if using the free version. I just wish to develop quickly, install more applications and have the budget to upgrade to their paid package.

[timconsidine]

And a lot of the Caprover apps have problems installing/running when you use more recent versions of the core repos than the initial package was built for.
I've just killed my Caprover and will re-purpose the VPS.
Too little return for too few viably deployable apps and too much hassle.

[bmann]

CapRover is a PaaS for developers, not for sysadmin / operators. I also know people who use both Cloudron (for apps they use to run their organizations) and CapRover (for deploying custom apps).

Any "one click apps" on CapRover will be similar to custom apps on Cloudron: totally up to the developer who is maintaining it to keep it up to date and compatible with CapRover and underlying software.

While it can be used by non-developers, I wouldn't recommend CapRover unless you're actively writing and maintaining custom apps.

Piku is another open source PaaS worth checking out for developers https://github.com/piku/piku

[robi]

@bmann said in Caprover... mysterious fails - Cloudron just works!:

Piku is another open source PaaS worth checking out for developers https://github.com/piku/piku

A benefit to those wanting app deploys on ARM devices like the rPi and clones.

[timconsidine]

If you're a developer, might as well just use Docker, Docker-compose, maybe portainer.
I struggle to see the value that Caprover adds.
But ... I am not a developer, so maybe I would not.

[robi]

Does Caprover also use a lot more storage since it doesn't have a common base image for deploying disparate apps?

[bmann]

@timconsidine CapRover is a way for developers to NOT have to use all of those things The basic pattern is "write a NodeJS app, add a file which explains what databases it uses". When you git push -- the deployment platform figures out what to package.

The approach around "git push" for deploying apps has been around for 12~ish years (pre Docker in many ways), and that's generally what the PaaS label refers to.

Heroku pioneered base resources (without Docker), and it's not been standardized as Buildpacks https://buildpacks.io/

Cloudron has standardized on Docker and then basically has its own standard set of resources like Buildpacks.

[taowang]

Caprover is a big name in the self-hosting domain, but I personally do not recommend it for 3 reasons:

1. It does not work well with Cloudflare which is an important tool for managing DNS and security.
2. It does not have a good community forum. I tried its slack forum, but the experience is not good.
3. Its documentation is okay but not detailed and comprehensive as Cloudron's documentation.

I also tried Yunohost today, but it doesn't even allow saving backups to S3 storage. You can only save backups on the same server as your app. Putting all eggs in the same busket is simply not a smart idea. Also, it does not specify how to upgrade apps. If you cannot safely upgrade apps, your self-hosting business (or hobby) is not sustainable.

So far as I discovered, Cloudron has the best backup approach, the best upgrade approach, the best forum, and the best documentation. I just started using Cloudron this week. The speed at which Cloudron staff replies to emails and forum posts is mind blowing. And they iterate their product based on feedback at lightening speed.

[marcusquinn]

@taowang Welcome. Agreed with all of the above and more.

[jdaviescoates]

@taowang said in Caprover... mysterious fails - Cloudron just works!:

So far as I discovered, Cloudron has the best backup approach, the best upgrade approach, the best forum, and the best documentation. I just started using Cloudron this week. The speed at which Cloudron staff replies to emails and forum posts is mind blowing. And they iterate their product based on feedback at lightening speed.

Welcome! You sound like me (and lots of us!) when I first discovered Cloudron a few years ago