Cloudron Forum

This is onlyoffice; and perhaps upstream.
But since this is a supported app, I'm posting here in case anyone found this problem and there's an easy workaround. Or maybe I'm doing something wrong.

You know how each time you have a new project online, the default is to go get a GAnalytics account, install the JS, and look at it every now and then?

If you are using cloudflare as a Global Content Delivery Network (CDN), it now seems to have analytics built in.

Not as advanced as Google's but more than enough for most projects. It also hosts static sites and it's really fast.

Cloudflare has its detractors, so do your research. But this could simplify one step in your next project.

@BrutalBirdie Thanks, very usesul. The more I get to use cloudron, the more I like it.

I haven't found anything that would do well as a wiki from the options that we have; it's kinda surprising that the best FOSS can offer is no match to commercial offerings.

I installed openproject with 'let the app manage users'.
When opening it for the first time, I try to register, and it tells me the admin must approve the user.

But I didn't get any admin user anywhere? (like in other apps where cloudron tells you in the app 'readme' what the temp credentials are).

How do I get an admin user?

@girish looks like nodebb self healed. The 'broken' state it was in is not broken anymore. This is good news

@girish I know, it's a terribly hard to fix problem (supporting plugins).
I don't have a solution. It's just that in my case I have to weight in this and make a decision.
Either nodebb without plugins, or do not self host.

Interesting, never thought it would come to this

@BrutalBirdie said in Nodebb reported to be buggy. Not having control over cloudron's release pace could be a problem!:

Here is a screenshot of one my main cloudrons availability report for my company with all internal tools for this year so far.

That's amazingly detailed. It shows you are a pro with servers. And that you really care about keeping things running. Which is not something I am or want to be. I'm a businessman nowadays and while I love to solve tech problems every now and then, it's not a good use of my time. I really believe selfhosting is a better way to deal with technology (and it foments freedom from bigTech), but the price of admission is too high at the moment for me.

First, I really appreciate cloudron. What it does is really amazing; a quantum jump from any other solution. I would not selfhost without it.

I have a nodebb forum that just silently broke when I wanted to remove the quill plugin. It seems the current nodebb version is buggy:
https://sudonix.com/topic/275/moving-away-from-the-quill-js-plugin/7

This brings me to the topic: do we get the latest version of everything (within reason)? Is anyone tracking whether that version is reportedly buggy? With my desktop OS, manjaro, I check the forums before they dump a big update. I install it a few days after I've seen the issues reported on the forums' "stable update" channel. I imagine there will be similar things for most of the apps cloudron supports.

We self-hosters probably cannot afford a devops person (let alone team). If a new version of an app gets published to cloudron, and borks a public production site, there's absolutely nothing we can do other than revert to a backup. This situation makes me uneasy. I want to have peace of mind more than I want to be independent and self-hosting!

Anyone thinking the same? What's your take? How much of your week goes to babysitting things that break with updates when you self host (even with cloudron)? I'm starting to feel this could be an uncomfortably high number.

@jdaviescoates I would love to have it too, more so because the current alternative we do have, calibre, doesn't seem to work stable.

@marcusquinn some instructions on how to selfhost logseq; https://github.com/dustinlacewell/logseq-guide
I'd love for it to be included on cloudron.

There's a huge community and this could be a stepping stone for cloudron to be more popular.

@nebulon Great app, an improvement over any wiki we have on cloudron now

What are the pros and cons of using surfer compared to sites for static hosting like netlify, vercel or render?

I'm guessing with surfer you don't have a CDN, which could be important. I'm planning to host the company site (converted to static) soon.

I haven't even installed surfer yet

@scooke good point. When I say 'working' I mean simply that emails are getting sent (throug apps in cloudron, in particular nodebb) and they land outside the spam folder.

@girish Thanks, it seems all is working now.
Thanks to everyone who saved the day

@scooke thanks, I know it can be frustrating to help someone who is trying too many things at the same time and who doesn't want to read the abundant docs everywhere. Email does feel like a black box. Right now there are MX records from titan.email (which I bought from name.com when I got the domain). I can remove those. But then how do I check test emails? I take what you mean is that I should use one of the cloudron webmail apps?

This is what I have on my DNS (name.com) for that domain:

However, what is receiving your email? If you are using Cloudron to manage your email, it doesn't make sense to use an external SMTP

Who is receiving email: gmail accounts for testing (2 gmail, one gsuite) and one titan.email for good measure.
Problem is that when I used cloudron with no relay, email did not arrive to anything but spam. As recommended here, I tried to mark as 'not spam' and reply to these emails, but that didn't solve the problem. It might be I need to do this more and be patient, but this doesn't help: I wanted to have launched this community weeks ago; by going self-hosted I'm adding a few days to the launch. Which is fine, this is a skill I want to learn about self-hosting and even encourage more people to do it.

What I don't want to learn how email works and all the certification layers that need to happen for email to 'just work.' This seems to be a rabbit hole, and an exercise in Yak shaving. If I have to, I will, but I have dozens of things that are higher priority now. Email is smack in the middle of everything. Unless you solve it, you cannot do self-hosting. And it is unpleasant: anyone who doesn't want to have anything to do with sysadmin/servers (99% of the population) will not go through this hoop. I've been on desktop linux for > 20 years and I find it too convoluted. You need to understand way too many things to get it to work. It's like going to a shop to buy a piece of paper, which is just a prerequisite for what you wanted to do, and getting a lecture about growing trees and making paper. A lecture that if you don't attend, you will get no paper. Period.

I'll push it through and get it done. But my hopes of getting anyone around me to get this done themselves have dropped to zero.

This could be a problem: 'test mode, we are reviewing your account'

EDIT: this might explain everything:

Might be waiting 24 hrs 'solves email'. I would still love to know if I should remove the MX entries for titan mail and use one app from cloudron to read email from this domain. The mixed mx entries might be causing trouble.

I think I have set up SPF, DKIM, DMARC with postmark as they instructed. My reason to move to postmark was to avoid getting stuck in spam folder for the time it takes for the domain to warm up. Which coulld be days, and that would kill the project.

Well, I got too excited too soon. Cloudron/nodebb is not sending email now that I have configured it to use postmarkapp.
From inside nodebb, I see the email sender is town.app@unstuckphd.com. And one cannot change it.

First, is cloudron using the postman relay?

Now when I use 'test email' from cloudron, nothing arrives to gmail addresses. But also NOT to the same domain sending the email (comm@unstuckphd as sender and receiver).

What do we know? Postmark can send email:

curl "https://api.postmarkapp.com/email" \
  -X POST \
  -H "Accept: application/json" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -H "X-Postmark-Server-Token: 7651aab8-f197-438e-a1c1-474edc977afc" \
  -d '{
        "From": "comm@unstuckphd.com",
        "To": "comm@unstuckphd.com",
        "Subject": "Hello from Postmark",
        "HtmlBody": "<strong>Hello</strong> dear Postmark user.",
        "MessageStream": "outbound"
      }'

Works:

{"To":"comm@unstuckphd.com","SubmittedAt":"2022-04-19T19:50:27.4884947Z","MessageID":"632b44b6-08ae-4c1c-883e-a834b7fe2f35","ErrorCode":0,"Message":"OK"}⏎      

I have no idea what to test next. This 'email not working' is a bottleneck to go live, and it has sucked 2 fulltime days of my life already.

@luckow Thanks so much. I got postmark to work. I'm happy something works now so I can move to more important topics Email was not in my mind something that could cause this much trouble.

FR: have it as an SMTP option.
Great deliverability and cheaper than sendgrind and friends.

@robi to a gsuite account.
12 hrs later, still no dice, so it might not be propagation
I'll try another mail provider, titan
EDIT: it works on titan email.
AND... it went to spam on my gsuite account. And on a gmail account.
I market them as 'not spam', and from that point on they still show in my spam on my gsuite and gmail.

This is a bit worrying right?

Is the IP I'm sending from in some kind of google mail blacklist?
Is there anything I can do, or should I go 3rd party for email sending? These are transactional emails from bbnode. I tried a different domain that is hosted with gsuite for email.

So for all purposes, the idea of sending email from this machine is dead in the water?

When marked as 'not spam', it still goes to 'updates' on gmail. So yeah, not a solution