Surfer v7 - new CLI, deploys, app passwords

[girish]

Surfer has undergone some breaking changes and thus a bump in the major version.

• The CLI tool is now @cloudron/surfer. This is a better place because own the @cloudron namespace in npm. cloudron-surfer is deprecated but will continue to work I guess.
• The old tokens will not work anymore. You have to fix up the CI to use the App passwords which were part of Cloudron 10. With this, we can now track which user is making changes to surfer.
• The new CLI offers a surfer deploy which deploys a site atomically. It also creates a eventlog entry which you can see in the "Deploys" view. This way you can track who last deployed and when.

[robi]

I thought App passwords were now API keys.

[girish]

@robi

1. API keys/tokens - use these tokens to make API calls to Cloudron REST API. What changed is that they used to be per user but now they are server level. This changed because only admins can make practically any of those API calls and we thought it's better to have all admins see all the api keys created/used as a security measure

2. App password . Use these to log in to apps. Also, for SFTP/WebDAV/CLI tools of apps.

[robi]

Thanks for the detail. @jdaviescoates is going to ask for this to be in the docs.

[girish]

As a follow up, you can also have multiple sites now.

If an alias has no "site" mapping, it falls back to Default site

[timconsidine]

@girish cool, look forward to trying it out

[timconsidine]

@girish works nicely, thank you.
I have 28 separate surfer apps, but it's mental clutter.
I think I can consolidate ~25 simple 1-page sites under one Surfer installation.

[jdaviescoates]

@timconsidine said:

I think I can consolidate ~25 simple 1-page sites under one Surfer installation.

Documenting how you go about doing that into a how to guide for the docs would be a nice touch

[girish]

Hopefully it's obvious to use. You just click '+', add a site. nothing else really

But also, one "catch" is that the settings are global and not per site. I would like to keep it this way to not complicate the app too much. So you might need multiple instances for each style of setting.

[robi]

I think @jdaviescoates means how to do it with existing sites, not how to click for new ones.

[jdaviescoates]

@robi said:

I think @jdaviescoates means how to do it with existing sites, not how to click for new ones.

Exactly. The process of migrating lots of different instances of Surfer into one with lots of Sites instead.

[timconsidine]

Manual way to migrate a website from a standalone Surfer app deployment into a Site in a single Surfer deployment servicing multiple Sites as aliases :

• for the purposes of this summary, the standalone Surfer deployment is dolphin.domain.tld
• for the purposes of this summary, the 'destination' Surfer deployment hosting multiple aliased sites is whale.domain.tld
• go to File Manager for dolphin.domain.tld (opens /app/data)
• click ... on public folder and Download (to your local device Downloads folder)
• close File Manager and go to app dashboard for dolphin.domain.tld
• uninstall dolphin.domain.tld surfer app (scary but you have the public folder on your local device)
• go to app dashboard for whale.domain.tld, click Location then add an alias for dolphin.domain.tld, click Save, wait for whale app to reload
• go to https://whale.domain.tld/_admin and log in
• click + next to Sites
• add site name ('dolphin') and site domain ('dolphin.domain.tld'), click Create
• screen goes to empty folder for site 'dolphin'
• use New to upload files and folders from the original dolphin public folder downloaded to your device
• N.B. do NOT upload the public folder itself, upload the contents of the public folder
• click View Site to check it shows as the original dolphin site.
• optionally delete the downloaded folder from local device (or choose to keep it as backup)

This is a manual process but it's not difficult, just repetitive.
I don't think it worth scripting unless you have 50+ sites to be migrated from standalone Surfer deployments to a single Surfer deployment with aliased folder. [I have not made a script, I use the manual process to review and curate, maybe even ditch an old Surfer deployment that is no longer needed.]

[robi]

@timconsidine Nice Tim, thanks for that.

Where do the files end up?

Since you're going through Surfer admin, what does the File Manager dir tree look like?

Editable in FM after or have to keep using /_admin?

[timconsidine]

@robi kinda similar to regular surfer
/app/data/public : files for main (default) site
/app/data/publi-<sitename2> : files for 2nd site
/app/data/publi-<sitename3> : files for 3rd site

Yes, editable in File Manager in the normal way.