What's coming in Cloudron 8.0

girish

(We split the features into two release 6.2, 6.3 and 7.0, 8.0 they are tagged appropriately below)

Features planned for 8.0:

(8.0) Multihost support. i.e you can have many servers and have a single dashboard to manage users, apps and domains - https://git.cloudron.io/cloudron/box/-/issues/142
(8.0) Implement LDAP+2FA across apps - See https://git.cloudron.io/cloudron/box/-/issues/705

These features are already implemented:

(6.2) Move apps to new base image v3 - See https://forum.cloudron.io/topic/4366/docker-base-image-3-0
(6.2) Database upgrades - MySQL 8, Postgres 12, Redis 5, Mongo DB 4.2.
(6.2) Update node to 14.15.4
(6.2) Update docker to 20.10.3
~~Add service account type . This will add a way to create a "service" or bot user that can be used for automation but doesn't appear in LDAP directory queries.~~ Decided against this because of lack of use cases.
(6.2) Make it possible to restore without updating DNS. This is useful if you want to test out cloudron backups.
(6.2) Add a way to manage apps <-> groups better. Currently, it's hard to get a grip on what apps a user/group has access to easily (maybe add filters as well).
~~FTP access to volumes~~ This is complicated, maybe some other release.
(6.2) TLS addon (for DoT in AdguardHome)

Update: 6.2 is out. We will work on 6.3 - https://forum.cloudron.io/topic/4723/what-s-coming-in-cloudron-6-3 . It's a required first step for multi-host.

thetomester13

@girish these are all welcome features! I never thought of the service account type but now reading it it makes so much sense!

Curious about the LDAP+2FA implementation - I know there's been talk of this in the forum before, but how would this work? It wouldn't require updating the upstream apps, right? One thing I've come across for example is that I have 2FA for multiple apps installed across my Cloudron instance. So while all usernames and passwords are the same (LDAP), I need a separate entry in Bitwarden since the 2FA codes are different. Would this feature solve this issue?

girish

@thetomester13 There are some apps that support LDAP but no 2FA. So, an intermittent approach until the upstream app supports 2FA is allow the user to enter "password;2FAtoken" in the password box of the app. On the Cloudron side, I imagine the UI is a combo/select box asking which apps to enable this feature for. This way, if the upstream app starts supporting 2FA, all you have to do is to enable 2FA in the app itself and then disable this feature on Cloudron side.

Bitwarden doesn't have LDAP, so it won't be able to make use of this feature.

thetomester13

@girish ooohhhhkay. I think it finally clicked in my head how this would work with Cloudron as the LDAP provider Thanks for the breakdown!

d19dotca

Looks like a great release! I’m most looking forward to Multihost support and being able to restore without having to make DNS changes before hand. Plus of course the updates to MySQL and such. Excellent news!!

p44

@girish said in What's coming in Cloudron 7.0:

Multihost support. i.e you can have many servers and have a single dashboard to manage users, apps and domains - https://git.cloudron.io/cloudron/box/-/issues/142

Great!

p44

@girish said in What's coming in Cloudron 7.0:

Make it possible to restore without updating DNS. This is useful if you want to test out cloudron backups.

Also this is a very interesting feature! Hours saved waiting DNS propagation ...

jdaviescoates

@girish said in What's coming in Cloudron 7.0:

Features planned for 7.0:

Sounds like another wonderful release you're cooking up!

It's all great, but these are the big two for me:

Multihost support. i.e you can have many servers and have a single dashboard to manage users, apps and domains - https://git.cloudron.io/cloudron/box/-/issues/142

Add a way to manage apps <-> groups better. Currently, it's hard to get a grip on what apps a user/group has access to easily (maybe add filters as well).

Multihost support will be awesome - as will a way to easily see who has access to what apps!

Thanks!

Lonkle

@girish said in What's coming in Cloudron 7.0:

Multihost support. i.e you can have many servers and have a single dashboard to manage users, apps and domains - https://git.cloudron.io/cloudron/box/-/issues/142

This is huge. Since Version 6.2 is next, is 7.0 coming after 6.2?

Also, this will likely also be in 7.0 as of today:
https://git.cloudron.io/cloudron/box/-/issues/773 (reference:
https://forum.cloudron.io/topic/4473/event-to-webhooks)

girish

Yes, so the changes in master have already piled up and we have completed all the database migration related code changes. The database migration is kinda massive because we also have to pretty much test every app on the app store with the latest frameworks and databases. So, far I think we only have freescout which seems to have some issues with PHP 7.4 but we are only half way through our apps I remember last time around we did this owncloud and wallabag was holding us back (both related to postgresql upgrade).

I won't create a separate thread as such for 6.2 because we only see it as an intermediate release for Cloudron 7.

Lonkle

@girish Gotcha, well, don't forget to add web hook support to the release notes if that milestone ends up being for 7.0! Really excited about web hooks tbh.

d19dotca

@girish said in What's coming in Cloudron 7.0:

I won't create a separate thread as such for 6.2 because we only see it as an intermediate release for Cloudron 7.

Any ETA on when 6.2 will be out, will that start later this week or will it be a while yet? No rush, just curious as I'm trying to plan some of my testing around that Backups behaviour fix for cleaning out missing backups.

girish

@d19dotca don't have an ETA yet. We still have many apps to port over to the base image before we can make a release. I will update this thread end of the week when I will know better how much ground we have covered.

malvim

Sounds awesome! You guys rock.

I've had an interest in multi-host support forever, but haven't been following the discussions as of late. Curious about how billing and support will work.

Is this a single dashboard for multiple cloudrons, so that we'll pay for each one separately? Or is it a single cloudron with multi-host capabilities, so that we just throw a bunch of machines on a single cloudron install and it just does its thing?

Thanks!

girish

@malvim said in What's coming in Cloudron 7.0:

I've had an interest in multi-host support forever, but haven't been following the discussions as of late. Curious about how billing and support will work.
Is this a single dashboard for multiple cloudrons, so that we'll pay for each one separately? Or is it a single cloudron with multi-host capabilities, so that we just throw a bunch of machines on a single cloudron install and it just does its thing?

We want to implement the latter i.e it's basically a single cloudron with multi-host capabilities, where you can add nodes to a single Cloudron install. As for pricing/billing, there will be some per-node pricing component to our existing pricing. I don't have the exact details yet.

marcusquinn

@girish The most interesting thing about this is the way most hosts charge less per CPU/RAM for the smaller VPS tiers to capture people price-comparing.

It might be something that pays for itself, where growing single VPS CPU/RAM can be exponentially costly.

girish

Most of the apps are updated to the new base image, yay! That was a lot of work but atleast we can be confident that the apps work with the latest databases. So, we will push out a 6.2 release very soon with the following:

Move apps to new base image v3 - See https://forum.cloudron.io/topic/4366/docker-base-image-3-0
Database upgrades - MySQL 8, Postgres 12, Redis 5, Mongo DB 4.2.
Update node to 14.15.4
Update docker to 20.10.3
Make it possible to restore without updating DNS. This is useful if you want to test out cloudron backups.
Add a way to manage apps <-> groups better. Currently, it's hard to get a grip on what apps a user/group has access to easily (maybe add filters as well).
TLS addon (for DoT in AdguardHome)

girish

Just finished up on the "Dry run" feature for Cloudron restore. You can use this to test your backups, test migrate to another server to see how well the server performs (for example, when you switch VPS) etc.

The way it works is :

you select this "Dry run" checkbox. When enabled, it will restore as always except it won't update the DNS.
Before you click 'Restore', add an entry in /etc/hosts for my.domain.com to this new server's IP. You probably also want to add entries for your app domains if you want to test them.
Once restored, and you feel happy, you can "switch over" to this new server, using the new sync DNS feature. This is in the Domains view.

ruihildt

That's great!

Will you potentially lose some data during the backup/restore time that won't be carried over to the new one if you're running "dynamic" apps (like a forum)?

imc67

@ruihildt I was thinking the same! For example emails getting in to the old server will be lost I guess.

girish

@ruihildt yes, any data generated between the switch over is lost.

imc67

@girish wouldn't it be a good idea to have something like a "pause switch" all it does is (don't know technically):

"freeze" all the containers,
then make a backup,
migrate to new server,
do some testing and
switch DNS
finally "un-freeze / un-pause" all the containers on the new server (leaving the old one freezed)

Between 1 and 6 you can show the now already available and customizable custom_pages and incoming mail is already buffered at the sender.

d19dotca

@imc67 This is easy to do manually in the meantime, but yes I agree it'd be awesome to have this process sort of automated. For me it's mostly just email I focus on that's likely to change between backup and restore, so I do a full system backup and once it gets to the "box" part of the backup I disable the mail container so that it won't receive mail after the backup. Helps a lot. Of course doing this if you have clients relying heavily on email like I do then it means you have to do this in the middle of the night though lol. The ability to automate this process would be awesome.

girish

@imc67 Ah yes, we used to call this "retire" back in the managed hosting days We used to show a page that the server is migrating. Incidentally, I just removed the retire script last night! It's really just systemctl stop docker box but of course these days you will see a "app is down page" instead of a better "migration in progress" page.

I have created https://git.cloudron.io/cloudron/box/-/issues/774 but it won't make it to this release.

d19dotca

I installed and ran 6.2 this evening. So far it's looking great. Loving the changes and improvements. Especially happy with the 'missing backup' cleanup task So far so good! Thanks for all the hard work you guys!

One word of caution for anyone who hasn't upgraded to 6.2 (pre-release) yet... the downtime experienced during this upgrade was significantly higher than normal. Usually upgrades of Cloudron have practically no noticeable downtime or if it does it's only for a couple of minutes, but this time the upgrade took around 20-25 minutes before everything was running again which I'm sure (based on the logs) was because of the major version changes for MySQL, Postgres, Redis, etc. So just be prepared for a larger downtime during this upgrade.

Edit: I may have spoken too soon with regards to backups... running into two different issues with it now after upgrade to 6.2.

girish

I can confirm the bug. Those on OVH object storage for backups should not update to 6.2. Note that only the backup entries in the local database are removed, the backups itself are intact in OVH Storage. However, this means that Cloudron won't "clean up" the backups in remote storage properly since it has lost track of them.

Fix is coming in 6.2.1.

humptydumpty

@girish I closed the upgrade notification by mistake. What's the changelog for v6.2.1?

Edit: Nevermind! I found it in the "Event Log".

    "version": "6.2.1",
    "changelog": [
      "ovh: object storage URL has changed from s3 to storage subdomain",
      "ionos: add profit bricks object storage",
      "update node to 14.15.4",
      "update docker to 20.10.3",
      "new base image 3.0.0",
      "postgresql updated to 12.5",
      "redis updated to 5.0.7",
      "dovecot updated to 2.3.7",
      "proxyAuth: fix docker UA detection",
      "registry config: add UI to disable it",
      "update solr to 8.8.1",
      "firewall: fix issue where script errored when having more than 15 wl/bl ports",
      "If groups are used, do not allow app installation without choosing the access settings",
      "tls addon",
      "Do not overwrite existing DMARC record",
      "Sync dns records",
      "Dry run restore",
      "linode: show cloudron is installing when user SSHs",
      "mysql: disable bin logs",
      "Show cancel task button if task is still running after 2 minutes",
      "filemanager: fix various bugs involving file names with spaces",
      "Change Referrer-policy default to 'same-origin'",
      "rsync: preserve and restore symlinks",
      "Clean up backups function now removes missing backups",
      "Avoid updown notifications on full restore",
      "Add retries to downloader logic in installer"

@p44 Multihost support sounds amazing. It'll make Cloudron unstoppable I think.

p44

@af

@A Former User said in What's coming in Cloudron 7.0:

@p44 Multihost support sounds amazing. It'll make Cloudron unstoppable I think.

Totally agree on this point!! I'm sure Cloudron team will do an amazing work!

girish

We started rolling out 6.2 over the last week, I think it will take until mid next week for the full roll out. As a heads up, there are two known regressions:

Renew all certs button does not work in the Domains view.
Linode Object Storage backups does not work . Trying to work out a fix upstream - https://github.com/aws/aws-sdk-js/issues/3404

humptydumpty

@girish I was about to post a "bug" about certs. One of my domains failed to renew 13 hours ago. I received an email from my CR about it.

{   "domain": "www.mydomain.com",   "errorMessage": "Unexpected status: invalid" }

I checked the logs and here's the timeline.
13 hours ago - certificate renewal failed
12 hours ago - certificate renewal succeeded
1 hour ago - certificate renewal succeeded (it ran it again?)

{
  "domain": "mydomain.com",
  "errorMessage": ""
}

Checking the cert on the site itself, shows that it did renew it successfully.

Edit: BTW, this is the same domain that I receive random messages saying that DKIM records aren't set properly but I know they are. The message comes back up a few days later. DNS manually controlled for this domain in CR.

girish

We will make another pit stop at Cloudron 6.3 before Cloudron 7 - https://forum.cloudron.io/topic/4723/what-s-coming-in-cloudron-6-3

mdreira

I know you already have a lot of work, but if the ability to have alias domains could be added to this version, it would be incredible!!!!

I am needing it.

avatar1024

I wonder if there any scope for implementing the restic backend for backups in cloudron 8.0?
See this thread https://forum.cloudron.io/topic/1575/backup-improvements-restic-backend

mdreira

I wanted to ask something about multihosting in relation to Cloudron licenses.

I will give you an example: the main server has a Cloudron premium license. Two more servers have a free Cloudron license.

Could I control the applications on the free servers from the main server? Domains, apps, backups, emails...

girish

I wonder how valid/relevant this post is now, since it's like a year old And all the features except multi-host are now implemented.

avatar1024

@girish true that it's pretty hard for this post to keep up with your coding speed

Maybe we should start a new clean one and you can let us know what you think on some of the newer ideas that were proposed (e.g. this one on my side)

Well done for you amazing work! (and the friendly support I have to say!)

girish

@avatar1024 Ah yes, I will add it to the 7.2 list. We are rewriting the backup code to use async/await, it will make it easier to integrate newer backends like restic in the release after that. In the past, I was a bit wary of adding more backends but I wasn't sure how stable they were. But it seems, storage players like https://www.rsync.net/ support them, so they are probably quite stable.

mdreira

@mdreira said in What's coming in Cloudron 8.0:

I wanted to ask something about multihosting in relation to Cloudron licenses.

I will give you an example: the main server has a Cloudron premium license. Two more servers have a free Cloudron license.

Could I control the applications on the free servers from the main server? Domains, apps, backups, emails...

@girish Can you tell me something about this I wrote one month along? Thank you

MooCloud_Matt

@avatar1024

@avatar1024 said in What's coming in Cloudron 8.0:

(e.g. this one on my side)

Same here, restic support could be a great idea for backups as an alternative to rsync.

girish

@mdreira Currently, that is not possible. This is what "multi-host" cloudron intends to solve. It will take us a while to get there.

allanbowe

We would love to see the following:

TURN server support for jitsi (to enable enterprise calls over 443)
Well Known support - to enable arbitrary well-known configs (not just a predefined list)

robi

I think the OP needs an update with the 7.x series of changes and more 8.x features.

/cc @staff

matbrgz

I'm wating anciosly the addon for rabbitmq

girish

@matbrgz Given that very no app needs rabbitmq at this point, it's easiest to integrate this into the app itself using supervisor.

robi

For Cloudron multi-host, it may be useful to have the DB data model as a local first concept, then sync with edge nodes.

VLCN does this as an open-source library for state management and sync.

VLCN augments SQLite, giving it the power to merge changes from other peers, notify your application of changes, and traverse remote datasets.
https://vlcn.io
https://github.com/vlcn-io/cr-sqlite

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What's coming in Cloudron 8.0