Per domain user subscription and admin role

[avatar1024]

I'm sure something similar has been asked already but I couldn't find it on the forum.

Would it be possible to add to following features of User & Groups in future version of Cloudron:

• subscribe users to a specific domain (say with another drop down option for each users: default being "all" but with the possibility to select domains individually - as it is down for selecting group membership). Those users would then only be allowed to login on apps which are installed under that/those particular domain(s). Effectively this is no different that manually creating a group for each domain and then manually setting the correct access permission when installing apps, except that it would automate that process by creating those groups in the background for each domain and setting the correct rights automatically. Also it would be helpful for implementing the "3. per domain user management" aspect of the "domain admin" feature below

• create a "domain admin" role to give some members admin rights but only on certain domains so that they can (and only can): 1. access all apps and email settings on a given domain(s); 2. an managed all of apps on that/those domain(s) 3. can see all users subscribed to that/those domain(s) and can invite new users to that/those domain(s). So as role we'd have: Owner, Admin (would automatically be administrates all domains), Domain Admin (which when selected would open the drop down menu to select domains without the "All" option), Users (which when selected would open the drop down menu to select domains, with default choice on the "All" option).

It feels these two features would greatly enhance cloudron management for cases where you don't necessarily want to have admins able to administrate all domains (either for security reasons and for reducing admin time) but still want someone able to configure email accounts / lists, manage apps and invite people.

Here is just some concepts and some ideas on how it could work on the UI side. Hope this proves useful.

[jdaviescoates]

Yeah, I'd love this, as per my post back in July:

Domain-based admin rights. I want to be able to give people all the rights of an Administrator, but only for specific domain names.

@girish responded to that saying:

I wanted to make a post about how we plan to implement this under the "service provider setups" feature. I will try to make a post about it early next week since we will need some input anyway before we implement the feature.

And here says:

Fix access control for service provider setups - There's a few small issues. Service providers wants admin flag per app, better control of SFTP user management and also to unify PHPMyAdmin across apps. We will see what we can do.

@msbt asked:

does this come with group- or domain-admins who can only install apps/add and edit users from their designated domains/groups?

And @girish said:

Not part of the multi-host but it's part of the "Fix access control for service provider setups"

I don't think @girish ever got around to writing his post about "service provider setups" though...

[girish]

The domain admin concept is clear, since it's quite popular in all the shared hosting concepts. However, Cloudron is not suited for shared hosting setups. It just wasn't designed from the ground up that way. You have to isolate users/groups etc to be per "org". Also, have to

Instead, we designed each VM/Cloudron to be for an organizational entity (and not for multiple organizations to be on a single Cloudron).

I also think business model wise, web hosters try to squeeze every bit of the hardware and overload a server massively with many orgs. This is not what we had in mind. Technically, we would make very different decisions if our goal was to have a server with 10 different organizations. (For example, shared nginx/apache servers etc would be better than our current docker based approach).

In any case, the product has to change based on what customers want So, if there is enough interest for this feature, let's see what we can do.

[avatar1024]

@girish Thanks for the reply and explanation Girish. I actually didn't imply I wanted a fully featured multi-organisation approach to Cloudron management, and even less if it implies major changes to Cloudron core design. I actually like that the current design is oriented to single user / organisation as it prevents centralisation.

The use case I had in mind was mainly for a single organisation that has several domains and a fluctuating users base of about 200. By default all users have access to all apps (unless you configure manually as I mentioned in the post).
The issue is that with users coming and going, you must make sure not to make mistakes with permissions and correctly isolate them from each domains by manually managing groups.
The other issues is that these users make regular requests to create email list, email accounts, adding or removing users. So it'd be handy to be able to give more people admin rights just for these particular aspects and restricted to a specific domain.

I thought what I had described was not a fully featured multi domains function for cloudron, but "just" (says someone who doesn't code) some additional domain management capabilities that could be implemented with functions that already exist in cloudron (namely with User Groups and different role levels). But I can imagine that when it comes down to doing, it becomes more complicated.

[marcusquinn]

Maybe the solution is just to make all apps only visible by their creator with "Only visible to the following users and groups" being the default option selected, until Groups & Users are added.

Then, it sounds like you could solve the multi-org issue just with your Groups naming convention, eg:

• org1-admins
• org2-admins
• org-1-websites
• org-2-websites
• org1-accounts
• org2-accounts

etc. Does that work for what you describe?

[jdaviescoates]

@marcusquinn it does, I think, but it'd be a lot quicker/ easier if you could just say (instead of defining per app) x group has access to all apps on x domain, y group has access to all apps on y domain.

[ruihildt]

I also would welcome that feature. As you can see having loads of different apps, it would be great to have users that can only deal with their domain related features.

[nebulon]

@avatar1024 also as @marcusquinn suggested, I don't see why assigning new users to domains vs assigning them to groups is in any way more error prone. The only difference is that apps installed have to be setup with the correct groups.

[jdaviescoates]

@nebulon for me it isn't about error proneness, it's simply a matter of being able to quickly and easily create and apply domain-based groups.

i.e. right now it is perfectly possible to a create a group and call it somedomain.com and then to manually limit any app on that domain to that group, it just takes lots of steps.

I'd be great (i.e. much quicker and easier) to be able to just say "limited all apps on x domain to x group".

[nebulon]

I can see the benefit, but honestly I think it is quite the edge case especially since it is already possible just not as convenient. I doubt we will add this any time soon, there are lots more important features to work on at the moment

[jdaviescoates]

@nebulon fair enough. I imagine quite a few people would find this useful, but could be totally wrong and agree there are more important features to be worked on. Really looking forward to the 6.0 release! Volumes etc sound really great!

[cyberfreakde]

@jdaviescoates Yep, this would be really useful. I have some friends who want to host their website on my site but I don't want to give them full admin roles.

[jdaviescoates]

@cyberfreakde you can already do it using the existing groups and roles, you just have to remember to do it for each app

[girish]

@cyberfreakde Right, as @jdaviescoates set, just create a "website" group with just the users and then set the group as the permission in the app's Access control view. The important thing to remember is that the "default" Access is accessible to all. So you have to go into each app and make sure it's not accessible to all. Another thing is that Cloudron "admin" always has access to all apps.

[cyberfreakde]

@girish How can I give them access to ftp without them being admin? Is it possible?

[girish]

@cyberfreakde Yes, in Cloudron 6, there is an option - https://docs.cloudron.io/apps/#non-admin-access . The SFTP access info is not displayed for normal users currently (which can be considered a bug). But they should be able to login with username@app.domain.com and their cloudron password (sftp port 222).

[cyberfreakde]

@girish Wow, Thanks! This is perfect. Somehow flew over it while reading the docs.

[robi]

@jdaviescoates @cyberfreakde
you can also set up a WP instance with all the groups configured as you need them, then just clone it for new sites and drop in users as needed. Config once, clone many.

[cyberfreakde]

@robi My friend wrote his own website so I have to use LAMP.

[jdaviescoates]

@robi thanks, but I can't really imagine when I'd want/ need loads of different WP sites with the same groups. The issue here it to be able to quickly add the same group to lots of different apps.

[robi]

@jdaviescoates Yeah, for that we need a group dropdown to select all the different apps.

[jdaviescoates]

I'm not sure why this has been marked as solved. Aside from all the groups stuff I'd still really like to be able to make people admins for a specific domain.

Like, right now I'm working with @thetomester13 on selfhost.cloud stuff and whilst I've created a related group and given him access to relevant apps, I can't add him as an admin because then he'd have access to all my other stuff too.

But it'd be really handy if he were an admin for all selfhost.cloud stuff so he doesn't have to ask me to restart apps, increase memory for apps etc etc.

[robi]

@jdaviescoates Maybe group admins would be easier to do.

[msbt]

I've asked for that a few times over the years: I would image a group-admin role for a user (who can have one or multiple domains). That group-admin can do all the stuff a regular admin can do, but only for the domains they're assigned to.

A second request was something like a user/app limit per domain (set by the superadmin), so that the group-admin and/or group-manager couldn't add more than 5/10/xx people/apps, so they don't trash the place and keep their resources in check.

This scenario would be for bigger servers that host multiple tenants which shouldn't see the stuff of the other users but can still operate independently.

[jdaviescoates]

@robi I don't mind how it's done, so long as I could make people admins for certain apps and not all of them

[marcusquinn]

Erm, separate Cloudron instances perhaps?

[jdaviescoates]

@marcusquinn yeah, that's probably what we'll end up doing. Just trying to bootstrap and avoid the cost of another VPS even though Hetzner are so affordable (I've got so many credits for referring people that the cost of another Cloudron sub isn't an issue right now, although of course often that'd be more than the VPS itself)

[marcusquinn]

@jdaviescoates I guess depends on the cost-benefit and I don't know enough of your use-case. Personally, I'd more comfortable containing clients by VPS. Overall, it's still a lotta bang for bucks and no more than a Spotify subscription or similar.

I guess if you're doing front-line support you could try haggling for a volume discount on the Cloudron side and those little Hetzner VPSs are pretty mighty eh!

[girish]

Cloudron is currently not designed for shared hosting style setups where "groups" of users can be totally isolated from one another. It's possible to make it like that, but I do think VM level isolation is the more modern and secure way of isolating organizations. If we are to do this, we have to re-think how all the features work in the context of shared setups.

[jdaviescoates]

@girish said in Per domain user subscription and admin role:

I do think VM level isolation is the more modern and secure way of isolating organizations

As @avatar1024 has also highlighted, there is very often the need to isolate different groups of people working on different projects within the same organisation.

Indeed, aside from very small totally horizontal worker co-ops where everyone had access to everything I can't really think of any examples of organisations where this wouldn't be a common need.

[girish]

@jdaviescoates said in Per domain user subscription and admin role:

As @avatar1024 has also highlighted, there is very often the need to isolate different groups of people working on different projects within the same organisation.

I think I may have not understood the requirements then. Don't cloudron groups offer a way to isolate groups under same org? The original request was domain level isolation. Is that common?

[robi]

@girish Also per domain could be interpreted as including subdomains.

[avatar1024]

@girish Yes you are right that the post started with different domains but this is because I had in mind the case of an organisation that uses separate domains for different activities, with different people being in charge of those different activities. While you are right that Cloudron does a fantastic job as isolating access to apps with the Group feature, as soon as if you give Admin right to someone, then they get full access to everything irrespectively of group / user access rules (which is of course kinda of the point of an admin!).
The issue is that in the case I mentioned, it would still be useful to give some people the ability to at least managed emails, users and apps for their particular domain / area of the organisation.
While this may not be a "common" case, I reckon it is not super rare either.

That said, the thread though as kinda of evolved into looking at ways to fine tune the rights of the Admin role rights rather than a split per domain as it started original. Lots of ideas in there. Maybe another intermediate Admin role could be step in that direction to delegate some rights (like email management) to people which would be useful in large organisations (see my second post) without granting full admin rights ?

[girish]

@avatar1024 I agree with breaking down admin role to be more granular. There is already a plan to make the admin "flag" to be per app in the next release. This is useful is you want a user to take control of a specific app (and the admin flag let's them restart/configure/view logs etc).

For a start, would making a role like "email manager" make sense? This user can operate on all the mail routes.

[kyzoe.be]

@girish having a email manager for a user would be allready great idea. So a user could control his own email adresses.

I totally on the other hand support the idea of a dimain admin, where users could control their apos and settinfs of the domain.