remote file access

[roofboard]

Problem

Some programs on cloudron really benefit from having direct file access on your computer. Like Grav for example. The ability to open you website up in a text editor and work on it is critical.

Ask

I would like to remote access and mount a specific cloudron folder to my computer like for example the "data" folder in grav. I have located it's exact path in the /home/yellowtent folder.

Method

I have looked at some methods using sshfs to mount the remote directory, but its not quite what I am looking for. I would really like to create a clean persistent tunnel between the server and my computer.

1. I am thinking about options like installing nextcloud directly on cloudron to run a synchronization service between local files and cloudfiles.

2. Permanently mounting the remote folder using CIFS SMB or SSHFS

3. Finding a commandline tool for continuous 2 way sync.

4. accessing remote folders using webdav or ftp

Has anyone had luck with the above methods? I am really hoping to find a solution which is easy and permanent and hopefully passwordless, making cloudron data folders persistently easy to access directly.

[nebulon]

We have sftp support for specific apps enabled. The docs are at https://docs.cloudron.io/apps/#ftp-access for this. Maybe the app in question does not have sftp access enabled (grav does not have it enabled).

The reason that we don't enable this for all apps is, that many apps need manual steps applied if randomly apps change behind their back as well as they often expect specific username/group permissions set on those.

[roofboard]

@nebulon
Alright... Looks like I have a solution here.
I used a software called FreeFileSync
Also. I added my public key found in ~/.shh/id_rsa.pub to the allowedhosts file on my server in the folder ~/.ssh/allowedhosts

You can test this by trying to connect to your server wish ssh, when ssh works without typing in your password then you are in.

For simplicity I connected with root, but maybe someone else can hop on here and talk about creating a special user at the system level for ftp access.

Root has access to everything!

As root, I told FreeFileSync to connect to the folder where grav is installed.
/home/yellowtent/data/<long hash code>

I also created a directory on my computer where I wanted to see Grav mirrored.

Then inside of grav I used the connect with ssh option to connec to the server as root and synchronize the directory where I need to have desktop access.

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This process could be repeated with any service on Cloudron, but I would also love to find an even better solution.

[roofboard]

@roofboard
What would be really awesome, would be a program which I could install on the server and on my desktop. Such a program like a CLI would run in the background like google drive and maintain real time synchronization at all times while being much faster than simple FTP.

[roofboard]

@roofboard
Hmmm I am looking at Rclone It appears to be the backend that many file sync apps like google drive use to "do the magic"

This may be a part of the better solution for folder synchronization...