how does cloudron do its job?

[adison]

hi.
i was curious, how does cloudron do its job in terms of having multiple applications?
i know it used to be that you had to first, in the old days, have a server for another application, then you needed another server for another application, then another server for another application, and so on.
i know cloudron uses docker containers, but how does it like get multiple applications on the same server? unless its just using different ports for everything. sorry, i'm just fassinated at this, and am curious.

[timconsidine]

Similar to having a VPS with docker installed, and then running multiple docker containers.

[jdaviescoates]

@adison have a watch of the video mentioned in this thread, and my notes on it, for more about how Cloudron works

https://forum.cloudron.io/post/20474

[scooke]

I haven't watched the video that @jdaviescoates linked, but essentially you need to read up on Docker @adison. Cloudron uses Docker to work its magic. HOWEVER, the wonder of Cloudron is how seamless and problem free running Docker is. I've tried running multiple Docker apps on my own laptop, and in the cloud on my own servers, using any number of tools, GUI and CLI, and for the life of me I just could never get it all to interoperate well beyond 3 apps. The fact that I FIFTY such apps all running on my VPS... yeah, it is fascinating all right.

[adison]

@scooke yeah, but its interesting. because usually, only1program is allowed to use port443. if i try to use it on any other program, it says, sorry, we not working because you have port443 on your computor. but cloudron can handle that problem fine.

[Kubernetes]

Docker is a very versatile platform that allows you to run applications in isolated environments, known as containers. Docker can have multiple apps on port 443 because of its ability to forward the traffic from the host's specific port to the container's port. This is achieved through the use of Docker's networking and port mapping features.

When you run a Docker container, you can specify the mapping of the host's port to the container's port. Essentially, every running container in Docker has its own IP address and it is totally isolated from all other containers.

[adison]

@Kubernetes wait really? so wile your machines IP address might be 1.2.3.4, the docker containers IP might be 9.10.11.12?

[Kubernetes]

@adison yes, exactly. and the container is not limited to only one network.

[adison]

@Kubernetes i'd then have to guess even if someone attempted a port scan, they couldn't find the port mapped. for example, even if they mapped it to port 9999, port9999wouldn't come up in any nmap scan, right?

[Kubernetes]

@adison If someone scans your machine, he will not find the ports that are inside the containers. But if you map a port from container to your machine, the "external" port will be found in an nmap scan.

[scooke]

@adison And this is accomplished typically by using something like nginx on the frontend. Both nginx and apache can do something similar on their own apart from Docker, and the terminology for this is virtual hosts (apache) and server blocks (nginx). I also already run 8+ webapps (wordpress, moodle, etc.) on a LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) using the virtual host ability. I've found the various tutorials on all these topics on Digital Ocean very helpful... go check those out.

Where Docker comes in handy is when the app you want to run is NOT something like PHP (like a node app), or doesn't use MySQL (like PostgreSQL or SQLite) - a simple LAMP stack just doesn't cut it anymore.

How much have you read already? Don't forget the docs for Cloudron itself.

[robi]

What you're after is the reverse-proxy configuration magic of nginx that maps app subdomains to internal containers on private IP space and ports.

[DualOSWinWiz]

@adison

Their are 2 options i

1. list itemf you have a intranet lets say you are hosting on your own premises and you have multiple vms you can use cloudron app proxy with authentication for all or selective or none and your internal app ip will be http://0.0.0.0:9000

2. If its not possible then another is have seperate vm / vps install portainer than install nginx proxy manager and you can do similar even nginx proxy manager offer ip whitelisting but 2fa still missing.

If you have multiple vms you can link them with wireguard vpn and with using nginx proxy manager you can manage hosting.

Portainer is only recommended as its give a visual interface to dark cli of linux.

I hope this explain most of it you can ask if needed more information.

[adison]

@robi aw ok. interesting. both posts are interesting.