Best posts made by d19dotca

These apps serve different purposes, so I don't think one can really answer the question without knowing the use-case.

My suggestion is if you only care about webmail, then Rainloop wins. It's quicker, nicer interface (IMO), intuitive, etc. If you however also want to manage a calendar and contacts, then SOGo is likely the better one as Rainloop does mail and contacts only, no calendar or anything like that. And even for contacts, it's differently managed - Rainloop simply stores them, but SOGo "hosts" them so they're also accessible via CardDAV protocols into apps like Contacts on macOS or iOS, Calendar on macOS, etc.

Basically, Rainloop is a webmail client whereas SOGo is what's called "groupware" as it will sync contacts, calendars, tasks, etc. in addition to the mail client role.

If you elaborate on your use-case, then people can probably give you a more accurate answer. Hopefully the above helps in the meantime.

@jdaviescoates Great idea! I'd definitely love to be a part of something like that.

What I do:
I do freelance web & tech services as a side business, and that includes hosting a bunch of things for customers which I do on Cloudron. Specifically WordPress websites for roughly 15 clients, and recently even some SFTP servers for one client too. Also a nodeBB forum for a client, Bitwarden password manager, email hosting of course, webmail apps, all that jazz. WordPress and email is the vast majority of what I host for my clients, but I get to dabble in other areas too which I like. Oh and web analytics too of course as that's bundled with my web hosting plan I sell to them, and to my surprise many of them actually really like seeing the emailed report from Matomo where they see all the results from each city, country, dates and times of busy traffic, etc. When I started offering it I honestly didn't think too many people would care, but most of them really like that part. I guess it sort of helps justify to them why they have a website in the first place so they can see how many people they're effectively reaching and such too in one area.

I don't necessarily market my services as a Saas-Cloudron or anything like that, just to be clear in case that's kind of what you were asking earlier, but I am very open in spreading the word of Cloudron (sounds like I'm in a cult, lol) to any of my clients that want to learn more about how I manage things, and even link to Cloudron from my website, so generally the customers that actually care to know that stuff all know I'm using Cloudron as the platform for everything.

Quick side story about the SFTP server I recently setup, just because I think it's really cool, haha:
Using Surfer, I setup an SFTP server to bridge a medical clinic (client of mine) administering COVID-19 tests and the lab they hired to actually process the tests. Before, they were emailing constantly between clinic and lab and it was a hassle for them to keep track of everything... and we later found out that the lab they contracted actually had a script which they use for their larger clients I guess - it polls the SFTP server every 5 minutes for a CSV file which the clinic fills it out and saves to the SFTP server for each patient, each patient being it's own row on the CSV. It's streamlined their entire process now - just that one thing alone - to the point where they get their results much faster now from the lab and can then forward that to the patients much quicker than before as it's way less overhead in communications between the lab and clinic. Once I heard about this and set it up for them and learned how much better it made things for them, honestly I was humbled in a way, I consider myself fortunate to have been a very very very tiny part of that process to ensure people can get their COVID-19 test results sooner. It really wasn't much work on my part at all, Cloudron made it easy to implement! It was still cool to be a part of an improvement to this essential service in my region none-the-less.

Sorry I'm rambling on now, lol, the answer to your original question is "Yes, I offer services to my clients that I host using Cloudron". haha.

As Radicale isn't the most RFC-compliant (they even state that's not their goal), it'd be nice to have a more compliant CardDAV and CalDAV server to use as an alternative to Radicale, SOGo, and Nextcloud.

A good one I have seen recommended often is "sabre/dav". It's also updated more often than Radicale too from what I can tell. I think this would be a great addition for those people who want a more pure CalDAV and CardDAV server.

https://sabre.io/dav/
https://github.com/sabre-io/dav

I just realized from comments on a different thread that you now have yearly/annual pricing which is a generous discount per month. I may have missed the announcement of those pricing changes, not sure when that came into effect but I appreciate it.

As a Canadian who ends up paying even more than the listed price due to currency conversion between USD and CAD, I am very thankful for the chance to have that discount by paying for a year in advance. Of course one has to have the means to be able to justify a year up-front, but I can definitely see myself using this for a year or more at least.

As a result, I have changed my plan from monthly to yearly, and I just wanted to say thank you. This brings down my total cost of ownership (TCO) by quite a bit. This takes me down from roughly $40 CDN to $20 CDN, saving me $20 a month, or $240 over the course of the year.

Anyways, ultimately I really just wanted to say thank you, and hopefully let others know about this too in case it helps them. This was a pleasant surprise to see.

Reference: https://cloudron.io/pricing.html

@girish It's also quicker to do from Cloudron at times depending on the VPS host as well. For example I'm hosted currently at OVH and it's not the nicest control panel, not super mobile friendly either and takes me about 6 clicks to get to the reboot option. Cloudron is only about 2 (login > System).

Happy New Year everybody!

Just learned how to deploy a custom app using Bitwarden as the test, but seeing as it should be delivered soon, figured I'd wait for the more official release. So on that note... is there any ETA yet for this app @girish or @nebulon by any chance? If it's going to be a month or two I may start with the custom app, but figured if it'd be just another week or two (or just less than a month), then I'll just wait it out.

Thanks again for all the work you guys do - including everyone else in this thread, as I was able to learn a lot from reviewing everything you all wrote!

@girish said in How about a Cloudron meet-up in Berlin in 2021?:

Yes! We did it when Kopano meet was getting packaged

Perfect! I'd join if it was online then. Would love to visit Germany someday, but being "at risk" (cystic fibrosis) I ain't travelling out of Canada during this pandemic, especially when insurance won't cover anything like that anymore haha

@p44 That's very strange. It should definitely save to your Sent folder. Did you perhaps have it set to save sent messages in a different folder? On iOS, you can go to Settings > Mail > Accounts > {accountName} > Account > Advanced and in there you can set the Mailbox Behaviours for Drafts, Send, Deleted, and Archive. Make sure it's set to the correct folder. Sometimes there's a difference between "Sent" and "Sent Messages". There are some semantic differences, though usually I find that only affects Junk/Spam folders as there's been previous discussions on those. The rest of them work fine for me but I may have set it up accordingly too back in the day.

The instructions above assume you're using the built-in Apple Mail app.

@girish Side note: can we make the GUI show 12 apps instead of 10? When it's generally 3 or 4 columns, 10 just seems like an odd number to use for displaying the apps on that page. Hopefully that makes sense. Just a side thing though, no worries.

Great topic! It's always fun to peek into people's offices. haha. Here's my home office setup for the moment. Been changing it slowly over the past year. Recently got a new chair I find much more comfortable than my previous one. haha.

I was going to write a blog post on this one day but here is a quick summary of what I found in moving roughly 12 WordPress sites to the WordPress app in Cloudron...

1. Use the All-In-One WP Migration plugin (https://wordpress.org/plugins/all-in-one-wp-migration/) to export the site, being sure to check the boxes in advanced section that say "Do not export must-use plugins" (if you don't do this it will overwrite the must-used plugins for LDAP authentication in the Cloudron implementation of WordPress)

2. Setup a new base WordPress site in Cloudron, and add in the same All-In-One WP Migration plugin. Now import the site file that was created in step one above.

3. After it's done importing, restart the WordPress site in Cloudron so that it can re-connect it's must-use plugins (initially I find access is lost to the main LDAP admin user until a restart).

4. Once in using your LDAP admin user, remove any old admin user and replace with the new one if you wish, and clean-up any unnecessary plugins and themes that are there by default.

Not only did I find this to be the quickest method but also the safest in terms of not losing anything at all. When I tried the Cloudron blog method it just seemed like a lot of extra work for me. But maybe that's because most of the sites I've designed aren't simple blogs, so maybe their method is still better for simple blog sites.

Enjoy.

Hello,

I was just thinking as I have about 30 apps now running on my Cloudron (many are just WordPress, not 30 different apps, lol), that it'd be great to see quickly without having to go into each individual app that those which I want auto backups are enabled and those I want disabled are in fact disabled.

Having a list somewhere would be great. I was thinking it'd be very useful perhaps adding a section on the Backup page that calls out any apps that are currently set to be disabled in auto-backups, so that anyone who's about to go in and do a manual backup for the whole system can see at a glance which apps may not be included or are otherwise disabled for backups.

Would anyone else find this useful? Is it possible something like this can be added to the Backup page in Cloudron?

Peertube apparently now has an LDAP ability now too. Saw this today: https://framagit.org/framasoft/peertube/official-plugins/-/tree/master/peertube-plugin-auth-ldap

Just curious how others organize their Cloudron "My Apps" dashboard. Do you use the labels feature much or just descriptive app URLs to keep them organized? Do you bother with tags? And if you use tags, what are some examples you do to solve problems?

I currently have about 20 apps deployed across roughly 12 domains, and am not having too much difficulty yet with organization but I can imagine a year or two down the road (if I'm still using Cloudron which I assume I will be for now) I may run into issues keeping everything straight in the Dashboard, so figured I'd see what problems people have run into and what they've done to solve them when it comes to organizing their apps.

@girish Ah, that's interesting. That isn't documented anywhere that I could find, so that wasn't known. Yes, 3 weeks sounds about right - the "a month" was more figurative as it was close. Unfortunately I can't say for certain now as the backups were failing due to disk space so I had to remove the old backups - this is how I came to learn of this discrepancy between my understanding of how retention time works and what was happening in my system.

Is this something we can customize by any chance? It's a great idea, I like that you're doing it for keeping backups when a package version change happens, because you're right - people usually don't see any smaller issues until a while later. I just wonder if it could be an option to overwrite it all for people who may not have a lot of disk space to spare. May be useful to expose that in the GUI.

On a related side note: One thing I've come to learn through using Cloudron the past 8 months or so is that there is a lot of stuff missing from the documentation that we only find out about later in the forum. I actually am the rare oddball who likes to write up documentation to help others (this is part of my day job), so I'm happy to help contribute these types of updates if you have a list or backlog of items that need to make it into the documentation. If there's anything I can offer on that side of things, I'd love to help so it improves the docs for everyone and hopefully prevents these types of issues from consuming your time.

@nebulon I think the app icons themselves should be left alone. Looking great!

@girish My two cents (and coming from someone supporting a mission-critical product written by a Fortune 500 company that's used by about 95% of all Fortune 100 companies, so "support" and "tech docs" are my jam, haha, hence why I've contributed to the docs at least a few times)... usually in the documentation it is best to clarify what you have tested on, rather than making specific recommendations because people could assume then that you only support it running on a particular provider for example. So I'd recommend something like "Tested on such-and-such plan with X provider", and then specifically make a note about performance varying between providers and then the general "minimum recommended" requirements regardless of provider for Cloudron to run.

I noticed that when removing a mailbox, it only sets up the mail server to bounce emails to it, but doesn't delete any mail data itself. I'd love to see an option where there's a checkbox on that dialogue pop-up where data can be deleted too. It seems weird to me that no data would be deleted, when generally that's what users I would think want done when they remove a mailbox.

I see the following benefits from implementing this feature:

• Improved efficiency in the workflow for deleting accounts when the admin intends for all the data to be removed too. Saves time.
• Prevents accidental missteps in the CLI by removing the need to SSH to the box in the first place.

Personally I believe that (almost) anytime a user needs to SSH to the server to achieve something on a Cloudron box, this is an opportunity for Cloudron to improve and "sell" a new feature to attract users who aren't interested in doing the system administration. As we've seen from recent posts, Cloudron seems to be attracting a lot of "newbie" sysadmins (which I think is great, that shows how user friendly Cloudron is!), and they may not be as willing to dwelve into the command line to remove data that we'd expect Cloudron to do for us when trashing a mailbox, for example. And heck, even the seasoned sysadmin can easily make mistakes and delete more than they intended (the rm -rf is a powerful command, lol) - we're all human. I think every time a user can achieve something from Cloudron instead of via command line makes it so much safer for the masses of Cloudron users.

@jdaviescoates Ah sorry I didn't see this sooner. Yeah my customers definitely enjoy the reports. I send them out monthly though, not daily. Here's some notes if this helps at all

• Running Matomo server in Cloudron (of course, lol)
• Enabled tracking of a dozen+ WordPress websites using the plugin that @humptydumpty mentioned earlier (https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-piwik/) with what appears to be the same settings too.
  ** I also enabled in that plugin to not count visits from sign-in admin users, I feel that keeps me from throwing off the analytic data a bit whenever I'm making a bunch of changes to the site where I'm needing to load up all the pages to check stuff in.
  ** I also enabled the 404 and Search Results tracking in the plugin too, which just makes it easier to tell 404 pages and such in the backend results in Matomo server as it highlights them better.
• I've got monthly reports setup from Matomo which go to the website owners on the first of each month. Here's a screenshot of what I'm sending them if this helps (some get more data if they request it but these are basically my default report styles):
  
  
  
• I have it set to send monthly reports, with a month report period, and via email using HTML instead of PDF. I can't recall why exactly I chose HTML, I think it was just easier for my clients when it was all in the email itself rather than as a PDF (it isn't like they're really filing them away where they need PDFs anyways), it looked nicer that way too and was more readable for them.
  
• I don't have any additional third-party plugins in Matomo, just using the base install.
• For the Geolocation setup, I've got it set with this one below, I found this one to be the most accurate for me and my clients:
  
• I've set the IP addresses of UptimeRobot (which I currently use to monitor my client websites and other services) to be excluded from the analytics. Though I heard this may not be necessary as they supposedly don't trigger the Javascript code from running, but I figured may as well be safe than sorry. UptimeRobot has a TXT file so it's super simple to add them all in with just a copy + paste.

Hope the above helps.

Was wondering if there was a way (in the future, I know it's not currently possible) to implement it so that if I backed up my Managed WordPress app for example, I could restore it into the Unmanaged/Developer WordPress app instead. And vice-versa.

This request would make it super easy for customers running Wordpress on Cloudron to migrate between packages. While this is easy enough with All-In-One Migrator plugin, it does come with some hiccups / caveats that people need to be aware of, and if it were possible to simply backup one app and restore in the other, it'd be far easier I suspect especially for newer people. I figured it might be possible with some modifications to make this happen, especially now that there's pretty much feature parity between the packages from the changes made earlier this week. Because in the end, they're the same app, just different ways they were packaged, right?

I realize it may not be technically possible or may be way more work than it's worth to implement, but figured no harm in asking. Thank you in advance if this can be made possible.

FYI - I of course already tried it, haha, and it works up until it tries to restore redis, and it can't find a redis file so it fails at that point (since managed didn't have redis integration. but unmanaged/developer does).