Best posts made by girish

First off, I hope all you guys are staying safe in these tough times! Our team is split in Santa Clara and Berlin and we are doing well!

5.1 will be a quick release. There are a bunch of security related fixes but the main feature is the integration of turn addon/service into the platform. This will help us get the video conference apps in asap since it's the need of the hour.

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

We are working on pushing out 2.2 early next week. The main feature planned is 2FA/TOTP support for the cloudron.io login and the dashboard.

Users will see a button in their profile section to setup 2FA. You can use Google Authenticator, FreeOTP or similar app to generate one time passwords.

To keep things simple this option will only enable 2FA for the dashboard login. App logins will not requires 2FA. From our initial investigation, many apps already support 2FA and making up some scheme like password+otp will have to carefully thought through from a UX perspective.

Before everyone jumps to conclusions So far, @nebulon has been trying to make coturn to be part of the app itself. This is indeed quite hard.

So, I think what this means is that we have to integrate the turn server into the platform code base itself. So, it would become an addon/service just like the databases and other things. And then nextcloud, jitsi, kopano meet etc can just use this coturn service. Integrating coturn into cloudron is not very hard but will require a new release of Cloudron.

Alright, we will add it back

An update on this. We tried to push the update today with a plan to roll out later this week. We found some issues with the database migration which we are currently working on. Over all, it's unlikely this gets pushed out this week.

Now for some good news: we have updated all apps to use the latest base image 1.0.0 (which is based off ubuntu 18 and contains many security fixes).

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...

Time for some progress updates!

There is now a system menu:

Inside which, there are services list. You can monitor and configure the services:

Backups can now be cancelled. Updates can also be cancelled. Yes, the layout is bit off here but it will be fixed before the release:

Also, we have reworked the email handling for apps a bit to support some use cases. Currently, apps are create a mailbox of their own and one cannot easily access these mailboxes (if someone replied to the email). We have fixed this so that apps can now be associated with any existing mailbox. By default, an address is auto-generated for the app. You can then change this to an existing mailbox which you can access using your credentials. It's also possible now to share the mailbox name across apps.

Give the holiday time, this release is mostly a bunch of various important fixes. No new major features as such. We are focusing on getting some apps (like a conference app and the bitwarden one).

Changes are:

• Show swap info in system graphs
• Make avatars customizable. Previously, we used to use gravatar. We decided it's best to not use that by default (given our privacy first policy).
• Import: Couple of important changes. With the CLI, you can now directly import a backup from an external location into your Cloudron without having to change your Cloudron's backup configuration. This way, if you have 2 cloudrons (one prod and one for testing), you can migrate the app from testing to prod with a single command (cloudron import) without having to rsync/scp backups etc. Another important change is that you can also extract a backup directly into the app's data directly and "resurrect" an app from there. This option is useful if you have a very large backup and you can use some external tool like rclone to download the backup (with resume support) and then import it into Cloudron.
• Lots of fixes to the repair UI. We had several issues with it being hard to fix apps in error state.
• acme2: Implement post-as-get. This is required for Let's Encrypt

Hi all,
I have just published Firefly III as an unstable app. Most of the packaging work was done by @thetomester13 . Thanks a lot, Tomer!

Code: https://git.cloudron.io/cloudron/firefly-iii-app
App store link: https://cloudron.io/store/org.fireflyiii.cloudronapp.html

The app is integrated with Cloudron LDAP. It will become a stable app after we have some auto tests for updates.

IMPORTANT: This app is only available if you Cloudron has updated to 4.4.4. This is because this app requires OpenLDAP compatibility (which we have now added in 4.4.4). Until then, you can try on the demo cloudron.

Just quickly checked, on DigitalOcean ubuntu images, motd news is disabled by default.

I have pushed a change to disable it by default for the next release of Cloudron as well - https://git.cloudron.io/cloudron/box/commit/c5cd71f9e35d1393f999b0e2d937558778becd80 (thanks @iamthefij)