Windmill: Open-source alternative to Airplane, Superblocks, Retool

plusone-nick

@chrisbol Thanks for posting this - I've dabbled a bit on a dedicated install and it is very useful!
@girish This makes me think that Windmill could possibly be used to enable lower-level system scripting to help with Multi-Host implementation

robi

https://www.windmill.dev

Turn scripts into workflows and UIs in minutes

Easily create internal apps and invincible workflows with code only where it matters. Self-hostable worker infrastructure: scalable, reliable, fast.
Fully Open-source alternative to Airplane, Superblocks & Retool.

Try Windmill Cloud Self-host yourself →

Backed by

Windmill infrastructure

Give your scripts Superpowers

Make your scripts production grade and build all of your internal tools with Python, Typescript, Go, Bash, Sql. Compose your scripts as workflows using low-code.
Share an autogenerated UI or build one using low-code. Run it reliably at scale on your infra or ours, with permissioning and monitoring included. Fully open-source and easy to deploy on small and large infra. Any dependency with zero-config.

Really fast

Instant Preview/Execution
Live logs and job starting in 20ms
Fastest Workflow Engine
Only 20ms latency between steps

Benchmarks

Scale to Any Cluster Size
From Raspberry Pi to large Kubernetes clusters
Super Snappy Apps
Build complex apps that load instantly

Scripts

Code to production in minutes

Run long-running heavy background jobs, script with complex dependencies, endpoints with high rpm or simple one-off tasks without any overhead. Trigger them from a webhook or the auto-generated UI and monitor them easily.

ebauger

With n8n, it's a must have in Cloudron

robi

@Kubernetes ?

simong

Thanks for the suggestion. This has everything I miss in n8n.
I run it on coolify and it doesn't require much configuration.

robi

New docs for self-hosting link: https://www.windmill.dev/docs/advanced/self_host

This is very similar to what @andreasdueren is currently packaging, so a reuse of the pattern will be useful.

canadaduane

I've been dabbling with trying to create a Windmill on Cloudron container. It's more difficult than other apps. Some notes:

There is a hard-coded set of ROLEs required of the postgres database: windmill_admin, and windmill_user. Windmill uses these in DB migration scripts as well as during runtime to control access and access levels (see this section). As far as I can tell, Cloudron's postgres does not offer flexibility to add new roles in the database.
Windmill's LSP (Language Server Protocol) is itself a docker container with various programming languages (node, deno, python, etc.) pinned to certain versions. Because of these pinned versions, it is difficult to integrate into a single container along with the rest of Windmill. This suggests the docker Cloudron addon may be necessary.
Windmill also runs workers within docker containers. This may also require the docker Cloudron addon.

In my effort to get most of Windmill running inside the same container, I have supervisord running with the following processes:

caddy
windmill-server
windmill-worker

Caddy (or similar) is needed in order to act as reverse proxy for both windmill-server and the windmill-lsp container's websocket service.

The biggest issue at this point is the hard-coded windmill_admin and windmill_user postgres roles. I'm not sure how to get around this other than to create a separate postgres DB, unfortunately.

robi

@canadaduane said in Windmill: Open-source alternative to Airplane, Superblocks, Retool:

The biggest issue at this point is the hard-coded windmill_admin and windmill_user postgres roles. I'm not sure how to get around this other than to create a separate postgres DB, unfortunately.

The design here is clearly more suited towards isolated deployments, so it might be good to reach out to the devs to see if they can find a way to accommodate..

canadaduane

We have a working Windmill instance on Cloudron, (container) released with MIT license here:

https://github.com/halecraft/windmill-cloudron

The compromise we had to make here was to embed a Postgresql server inside the container, rather than connect to the one provided by Cloudron's postgres addon. Short of modifying Windmill itself, this was the only way we could give Windmill the full control over the Postgres instance that it needs / assumes it has.

msbt

@canadaduane cool, but it seems it's not yet available to the public

canadaduane

@msbt said in Windmill: Open-source alternative to Airplane, Superblocks, Retool: