Cloudron Forum

The developers are responsive and intelligent. The community rallies behind one another even the non-developers cheering on the developers.

There's a new update at least every few weeks to Cloudron so it's clearly actively maintained and it's just a brilliant platform with exciting new features that the community actually gets to weigh in on. So, yeah, thanks everyone for putting up with my incessant posting and allowing me to be part of the future of the web (I really believe that's what the Cloudron concept is going to be).

It was @fbartels live coding video on Matterbridge that helped me understand Docker, and Cloudron's context within it. I searched high and low for everything I could because I hate watching video tutorials (I'm a reader). But I really got into the video and it successfully helped me create my first app. So, I just wanted to thank him in a public way because without his video, I may not have even joined the forums - and all of you guys are great! ️

Edit: Video link in the forum below. It inspired me to become a Cloudron developer enthusiast. You should check it outtttt!

I'm making this a separate request from WP Multisite Official Support because it actually would cover a lot of use cases way beyond Wordpress. Almost every control panel allows for aliases in this way, and would be very helpful for Cloudron to add this as a base feature in the Location tab of every app (choosing whether you want a domain to be treated as a redirection to the primary domain, or as an alias to the primary domain - to which the web app would handle the routing - and that is currently already built in to Wordpress' Multisite feature).

@marcusquinn I love being a developer user myself. Contributing to the code that I'm using to run my web apps (custom or otherwise) I find very fulfilling. I followed @mehdi's advice and submitted the contributors agreement so I hope to contribute to Cloudron in a meaningful way. ️

Something like this, that would download the URL lists, decompress, and keep them updated:

I’d def like to be part of an online get-together. The forum is great, don’t get me wrong - but an intentional online get together I think would be incredibly beneficial to the community since we all seem to have a lot of passion for the platform.

@nebulon That's absolutely amazing what the two of you have created. Like, seriously, this is fantastic. I haven't been this excited about development in a lonk time (if you couldn't tell from my over-zealousness in the forums, I forgot how much I enjoy development).

I see some people have “app dev” labels on the forum. And I know my VPN Client isn’t on the store yet. But I wanted to ask that once girish and I figure that out - I wanted to ask if I’d get that cool label too? 🥺

I think this thread is valuable for @girish and @nebulon - because there are people like us who are passionate about open-source and we all have different reasons why we want to develop for and maintain apps for Cloudron and though I don’t have any issue with “semi-open-source” - I know a lot of other developers that do. Which this discussion and girish's / nebulon's reaction to the entire thread of opinions - may be a way to attract new develoeprs: “Cloudron goes fully open source” kind of headline.

I will say tho - if Cloudron became closed source I would stop creating apps for it (and I have 5 apps I have in mind to continue to port already)...okay maybe, I'm 50 / 50 on that (I really like Cloudron ). But I couldn't have created the apps I have now without direct access to their very readable and commented source. Though, they’ve made it decently clear thats not what the developers want to do (close the source entirely).

So yeah, I want to continue to hear people’s passion about their open source software beliefs and how they feel about it in the Cloudron context.

This was a recently upvoted feature that was closed out but I see it as an important one for casual users. Customization of the UI by adding or removing the various links and elements is part of the “Branding” experience that was recently released. @andres-moya put it this way in Gitlab which I very much agreed with:

“ One of the useful features of Cloudron is to give users a single panel with all the apps they need in one place. But if we need to use some app that is not viable to be packed into Cloudron, this feature is lost.

But if we were able to add custom buttons to external apps, this would be great.”

@malvim That’s exactly how I feel about @nebulon and @girish. When I found out there was only two main developers, it blew my mind. I have so much respect for their company and the software their built / build - it’s probably why I’m so invested in making it the best it can be. I should cool it with the feature requests.

Cause they have enough on their plate, but despite that @nebulon has taken a lot of time out of his day to debate with me about a Cloudron procedure in another thread. It’s touching that he’s taken so much time to explain his perspective and consideration of my opinions.

@girish often goes out of his way to help me understand box code too. Like linking to individual lines in the git just to help me understand. Like what other creator of a huge project like this would do that for me? Answer: @girish is one of a kind!

My favorite thing about both of them though is sometimes, people will request something for box and they’ll have it done and committed in an hour for the next upgrade of Cloudron. I plan on packaging a lot more apps but this has been a fun and wild ride. Thanks to the @appdevs and @girish / @nebulon.

@girish said in Domain Aliases:

I have checked with WP multisite and it works well (I am sure there are possibly package tweaks we have to do further).

You da man! This was the big box change to make it all possible. There are some subtle Multisite changes, that I'll submit as PR to WP Developer and WP Managed. They involve:

1. Upgrading the databases of all subsites on on WP Update (by default, it only upgrades the primary sites database on upgrades and overlooks sub-sites which can cause conflicts) - and this requires only a few WP-CLI lines of code after a WP Update (it detects version changes and upgrades all sub-site databases right away to prevent any sites getting out of sync from the primary sub-site which automatically has it's database upgraded when needed).

2. The default WP-Cron script included in Cloudron's package runs every minute and disables Wordpress built-in Cron. Sub-sites need to be accounted for when disabling cron, and luckily, I wrote another WP-CLI that loops and runs the Cron Queue for each sub-site (if they exist).

3. (Optional) I'm writing a "Cloudron for Wordpress" Must Use plugin to make sure if a domain gets changed from within Wordpress, it adds the new domain to the list of aliases in app locations within Cloudron's Dashboard. I see you added an API endpoint for this so it'll be easy enough for me to do, though a user will have to enter in a login token or app token into the WP plugin (UNLESS you'd like to automate this on install).

I've packaged an OpenVPN Client for Cloudron that can:

• Change VPN Servers on-demand using a full PHP / Apache based backend
• Connect to other Cloudron apps for all of their traffic (except for incoming traffic to the web app itself) to go through the VPN Server's container (which will allow for some cool intranet webapp stuff I'm sure)
• It mandates the use of LDAP so it has a log in system and only administrators are allowed to change the server the OpenVPN Client app is connected to.

So basically a VPN Client that accepts any .ovpn or .conf file to allow for connection to a new server that a different Cloudron app would be using.

I'll update this with the Github for the project. I haven't pushed it since it was finalized.

@girish You said you wanted to discuss if there needs box code changes. I outlined the 15 lines of codes that need to change to make the app work. I also have not written a dropdown box for the Cloudron Dashboard's App Settings page to "Choose which OpenVPN Client app to route your traffic through?" since I just got the hotfix tool working. Having the OVPN Client app choose the other app to connect to is possible in-app if you'd prefer to put it in there. But I'll need to make a few adjustments with the token access to make that happen seamlessly. But I do see a case for allowing users to know they're connected to an OpenVPN Client on the dashboard, just my two cents. So, the dashboard stuff is optional and up to you. But the slight box changes are unavoidable and outlined in your DMs on this forum from me. ️

Oh, POLL TIME:
• How many of you would actually want to connect more than one other app to the OpenVPN Client Cloudron app a time. It's possible (with caveats right now), but if there is demand, I'll think more of a solution to make the amount of apps able to connect to it more than 1 at a time (with no caveats which I may need to pick @appdev's brains' for help on that one).

@girish Okay, yeah, that makes sense and I hear you on that. I got over-zealous with box changes when I started making them myself. But things like Dot the Repair Bot (the one that monitors all Cloudron apps and repairs them the once if they switch to an UNHEALTHY status), the entire code can just run inside it's own lil app and maybe even be an app on the store one day as an option for users who like the idea (though it just does feel more right being a "global" option). Hmmm, but if Dot was on the store, he'd be like an app a Cloudron add-on, never thought of asking if the community would want something like that. But his name is non-negotiable. He's Dot, the repair Bot!

As for me, you could tell me 2022 and I wouldn't be disappointed. I'd just be ready to code when you were. Now that I can make box hot fixes, I should be able to make any outer level changes I need if and only if an app I'm making needs them (which I hope the VPN Client will be the only one that needs them ). I'm incredibly grateful you accepted to us adding the needed hot fixes to box for the VPN Client to run stably in the actual app store. I'm super excited for that, but I don't mind if that's years away - just that you agreed to do it one day is fine by me.

And yes, I've thought about the irony of Dot the Repair Bot, all of the sudden, Not Responding and needing a repair to get back working for some unknown reason!

I use WP Multisite already with subdirectories but I'm still in the "testing phase" of my Cloudron usage. I recently found out that at the Cloudron level, you can't add more than one top level domain, making one of the most important aspects of WP Multisite broken. It actually may be the only aspect of multisite that's broken on Cloudron (everything else works perfectly with subdirectories). This is, in fact, a Cloudron limitation and shouldn't be too hard to allow for domain aliases instead of only domain redirections (which breaks the built in WP Multisite domain mapping support). I've found a few users on this forum that want this. And, for me, to switch Cloudron to production, is a feature I'd need.

I'm getting more and more familiar with the Cloudron API, so I'll create a Wordpress plugin that when a domain gets mapped within Wordpress, it automatically adds that domain to Cloudron's domain aliases (if you decide to add this in addition to your current domain redirections) so that the experience will be absolutely seamless for users. I don't need this since I only run three mapped domains, but I want to make Cloudron the best it can be for the average user (the more successful you guys are, the more you'll be able to work on this platform that I'm growing to love). I've already made a plugin that does this very thing for CPanel so it won't be difficult for me to do so for Cloudron as well. I want to take as much load off the developers as possible so they can work on bigger picture Cloudron infrastructure (example: 6.0 stuff).

@wexlerj Yeah, @girish and I are working on domain aliases first and foremost as that's step #1 in getting multisite to work properly. That's what's minimally needed to make multisite work on Cloudron.

From there, I plan on making plenty of Quality of Life changes focused solely on Wordpress Multisite. But when @girish and I work out and release the Domain Alias feature, I'll ping ya to let you know you can start using this plugin. ️

Wait a second does focal support...is that the name of Ubuntu 20.04. If so...uhm, I'm an idiot. I've been wondering what focal support was for days and even looked it up.

@robi Well, I don’t plan on stopping, personally. I’m having a blast writing the OpenVPN Client app and I have so many more ideas. But, one at a time here.

So, the "Cloudron CLI" has a bunch of important functions that the REST API doesn't, yet the REST APIs documentation says the CLI uses the REST API. Are there just undocumented REST API functions that the Cloudron CLI client has?

My main goal is that I have a Docker container (https://github.com/dperson/openvpn-client) that runs external to Cloudron (named "vpn") on the VPS (though I could build it into an actual Cloudron app if needed). And I need to run my Cloudron apps on demand through that container using the --net=container:vpn argument when using Docker Run.

The CLI will allow me to update the VPN as needed if I turn it into a Cloudron app, but I haven't found a way within Cloudron CLI or it's REST API to add that argument --net=container:vpn before it starts an Dockerized app.

Does anyone have any ideas?

@jdaviescoates I’m an idiot, you’re absolutely right: https://forum.cloudron.io/topic/2686/live-stream-on-creating-an-app-for-cloudron?_=1602281676588

This is the clip that made me a Cloudron developer enthusiast. I think it could help anyone / everyone starting out.

Also, if anyone has any questions let me know. I had to take the week off work due to a hugely personal situation. But I’ll be back on Monday full steam on the forum and would love to help any new developers (in the same way @fbartels helped me, indirectly). I don’t know as much about box as @girish but if someone is making an app that needs deeper level dockerode / Docker / node knowledge - let me know. It took me 4 days to understand how node asynchronicity worked. So if I can help someone turn that into one day. I can tell you how do to so.

Note: Cloudron box uses callback Node methodology so when researching it, make sure to look into that type of methodology when it comes to handling asynchronousity since this project was started in the timeframe callbacks were the most popular.