For the coming weeks, we are going to focus on getting some new apps packaged. The list is:

• OnlyOffice
• Bitwarden - @Felix and @iamthefij have done much of the heavy lifting, we just have to get it across the line.
• OpenVPN - We will add an admin interface that let's the admins configure some popular vpn settings.
• BigBlueButton or Jitsi (we will evaluate which works well for conferencing. We have used both and they both work well but BBB might win). If you have any thoughts here, please leave a comment.
• Development apps - basically provide a git push workflow for hosting custom nodejs/php apps (and make it work so that they can be mixed with various caches and databases).

If we should prioritize something else, please let us know! But the above should keep us occupied this month.

What we initially planned as Cloudron 4.5 is now Cloudron 5. We decided to bump the major version since it got a lot of changes to justify the bump.

New installations will already get Cloudron 5. Existing installations will get an update in a week or two. We roll out updates conservatively as always, if you want it immediately, please just send a mail to support@cloudron.io and we will make it available.

I am preparing the blog post which will have the screenshots for the features.

Changes:

• Add user roles - owner, admin, user manager and user

• Show backup disk usage in graphs

• Mail server event log and mailbox usage information

• Spam auto-learning - the spam solution is now per mailbox. The mail server will now periodically auto learn spam and ham from the mailbox with no user intervention.

• CPU resource allocation - We have implemented CPU Shared

• Whitelabel the footer/404

• App specific passwords

• Import backups UI - this lets you easily move apps across Cloudrons

• Display timestamps in browser timezone in the UI

• linode: add object storage backend

• Enhancements in the built-in LDAP to better support SOGo (more on this in a separate post).

There's a lot of other bug fixes as well. You can read through the commits for that

Hi all,
We released Cloudron 4 now. The blog has more details about the release.

Changes:

• SFTP access is built into the platform. As of this release, WordPress, Surfer and LAMP apps support SFTP access. You can get the SFTP credentials from the i button in the app grid. Note that the username for each app is different!
• App tags and labels - this lets you easily categorize and search app. The current UI is very basic, we hope to iterate on this. Feedback welcome.
• Scaleway Object Storage backend for backups
• Easier email import. There is some basic docs on how to use imapsync here
• Unmanaged WordPress app - this app allows you to edit WordPress code unlike the existing WordPress app. Since, we let you edit the code, we won't deal with updates either. You can to use the WPs built-in updater for that. Docs for this app are here. Currently, this app is marked as unstable. So, you have to enable the unstable flag in settings before you can install it/see it in your Cloudron.
• Immediate App Update notifications
• Backups created right before an app update are retained for upto 3 weeks. This lets admins roll back in case they notice some breakage late.
• Community/Unstable apps. There's been a lot of app packaging going on and we can't keep up with testing of all the apps. So, we will get them all listed in the coming weeks, so others can easily test them out.
• Upstream app version is now listed in the app info dialog
• Support for email relays that do not require authentication and self-signed certificates
• Cloudron updates can now be applied without taking a full backup. This was added for situations where there might a bug in the backup logic and an upcoming Cloudron update fixes the backup issue.
• Add a way to disable outbound mail for a domain. Email -> Outbound -> Select Disabled

For the coming weeks, our focus is simply to get more of the apps out. bitwardern/jitsi/matrix etc are in various states and we want to get those out asap.

We are working on some ideas on the Cloudron side:

• Mail fts search - This will be optional since the dovecot+solr integration takes a lot of memory.
• Mail server queue and reports - This is just a UI to get an insight into what emails are incoming and outgoing on the mail server
• Mail spam controls - This will tackle the popular "Spams are still getting through" reports
• CPU resource allocation - Currently, you can control memory per app. This will allow you to control the CPU allocation as well.
• Firewall API
  • This will allow setting up basic application firewall rules. This is not clear yet but we will build on top of modsecurity/fail2ban potentially.
  • For email, this will have whitelist/blacklist
• Backup - listing, download and remove API and UI (for box and the apps).
• Per-app backup format.
• Group admins - The idea here is to create "sub admins" who can invite users but cannot control server level settings like backups.
• Whitelabel the footer/404
• App specific passwords

BTW, if you have comments/suggestions, feel free to open a thread in the Discuss section or comment here for any clarification

@jdaviescoates For pricing, as mentioned, we just offer discounted pricing on a case by case basis. Given we are a small company ourselves, we don't want Cloudron pricing to be a blocker for another business relying on us. We have a dozen or so re-sellers and they are generally IT admins, sysadmins who host for co ops, non-profits and schools.

As for Cloudron the company itself, we are profitable and pay ourselves a salary, and I can say we are not going away anytime soon. We are completely bootstrapped and haven't tried to ever raise money nor do we plan to. Future wise, one thing we really want to happen it is to grow to a size where we can start supporting upstream opensource apps - either by contributing with people or funding them.

https://vikunja.io/
https://code.vikunja.io/

Hi all,
We released Cloudron 4.4. See the blog for screenshots and more info.

• Show swap info in graphs
• User avatars are now customizable (click on the profile photo icon). This removes the use of gravatar for privacy reasons.
• import: add option to import app in-place
• import: add option to import app from arbitrary backup config
• Show download progress for rsync backups
• acme2: Implement post-as-get
• AWS Marketplace image
• Stopped apps are be auto-updated anymore (since they won't run migration scripts).
• eventlog: track support ticket creation and remote support status
• cloudflare: support API tokens
• Add search field in apps view (this only appears if you have many apps)
• Make app view tags and domain filter persistent across browser refresh
• Add timezone UI. We used to auto detect this but clearly it's imperfect, so we have decided to expose it. This allows you to precisely configure when backup and update tasks get scheduled.

Hi all,
Mastodon is now available in the app store. Most of the packaging work was done by @syn . Thanks a lot, @syn!

Code: https://git.cloudron.io/cloudron/mastodon-app
App store link: https://cloudron.io/store/org.joinmastodon.cloudronapp.html
Docs: https://cloudron.io/documentation/apps/mastodon/

https://yetiforce.com/en/

https://github.com/YetiForceCompany/YetiForceCRM

Good question! So far, we haven't been overwhelmed with the app count. I think we can actually easily support far more. This is only because:

• The main packaging cost is the first initial version. If you see the source code of any app package, we hardly have to make changes for a new release. It's mostly bumping the version. I am hoping once we have a CI/CD app on Cloudron, we can automate this part.
• All our stable apps have tests. We don't test anything manually. The apps that don't have proper automated tests (like confluence), we have regretted publishing. But we keep them supported and test them manually since enough paying customers are using it. But that was a lesson for us to not add apps that don't have tests.
• Many of the new apps that we are publishing now was packaged by our community - @msbt , @iamthefij , @Felix, @thetomester13 , @jimcavoli , @murgero (there's also 2-3 more but I am unable to find their id) etc. So, we are just building on top of their hard work (thanks a lot again guys!).
• Finally, our goal is not to package all the apps possible. We just want the best 2-3 apps in each category. So, if there are 30 categories. This will only come to 90 apps or so.

All that said, if you see a drop in quality in support or general, please let us know and that will a hint for us to look into adding resources

It seems people are struggling to build. @iamthefij if you have your docker image public, you can just put it here. People can then install it as:

cloudron install --image <image> # run this in the repo directory

No need to build!

How about this then. On Cloudron, install socat and also open up port 5555 in iptables. Then just forward port 5555 to the internal mysql.

root@localhost:~# apt install socat
root@localhost:~# iptables -I INPUT -p tcp --dport 5555 -j ACCEPT
root@localhost:~# mkdir /etc/iptables
root@localhost:~# iptables-save > /etc/iptables/rules.v4
root@localhost:~# docker inspect -f '{{range .NetworkSettings.Networks}}{{.IPAddress}}{{end}}' mysql
172.18.0.4
root@localhost:~# socat TCP-LISTEN:5555,fork TCP:172.18.0.4:3306

• Then you can connect from your PC or minecraft server to the sql server using port 5555 as:

$ mysql --user=e89d41145799e97 --password=e97e3fb41f3e52dd2462997d6008ccc0e0b0cffb9443b4ff --host=my.cloudron.domain --port=5555 e89d41668599e97
mysql> show tables;
Empty set (0.01 sec)

You have to install the socat as a systemd service or such to make it persist reboots. Otherwise, just use nohup socat TCP-LISTEN:5555,fork TCP:172.18.0.4:3306 &

I see, I think this can be done with some socat forwarding. I will try tomorrow.

We had a prototype of this a few releases ago. The idea was each user gets his own "space" (funnily, the same name you used ). User can add/remove/manage their own apps. We didn't implement domain or mail ownership. Back then the feature didn't receive much traction, so we removed it.

Maybe we can find 5-10 people who will want this and then we can think about bringing it back but it's totally doable!

@avatar1024 Thanks, I have put a note in our doc for now. We will try to put a note in the UI as well for next release - https://cloudron.io/documentation/user-management/#administrator

Also, users appearing in the app itself relies on LDAP sync which the app may or may not support. (This is why, just for consistency, we simply tell people to make sure users login to the app first.)

Just to follow up on this. Now that we have owner role in Cloudron 5, install/update/repair/exec of apps that use the docker addon is restricted to owner in 5.1. This then means that an admin cannot get access to some shell and access docker and hijack the system.

On a technical note, docker is accessed by apps via proxy. This proxy verifies that only apps that request the docker addon can access the docker API. The proxy also ensures that random volumes cannot be mounted (only /app/data of the app can be volume mounted).

We just integrated coturn into master branch yesterday. So, we are waiting for testing it a bit to get matrix published. Otherwise, the first complaint is going to be that voice doesn't work...

Does minecraft support connecting to mysql via ssh+tcp connection? Like how mysql workbench does it - MySQL Server using TCP/IP over an SSH connection. See https://dev.mysql.com/doc/workbench/en/wb-mysql-connections-methods-ssh.html

Maybe we can have a subtext somewhere that admins can always access apps. For example, in the users UI when assigning role.

For discourse, we found that it doesn't have proper LDAP support yet. Please see https://forum.cloudron.io/topic/2/discourse/20 . If a plugin comes up, we are happy to integrate it into the package.