Cloudron Forum

I bet at some point we save more time as Cloudron users by packaging apps ourselves and documenting the process, maybe improving it via LLM, than waiting for the roadmap

@girish About "app is down", I'm interested in a way to tune "restart automatically" for app being down. It's not the first time I notice an app is down or not responding because it crashed during the night and in the morning I have to manually restart it.
it happened for instance that my wordpress blog was stopped due to high traffic because of being on the frontpage of hacker news... and so was down for several hours... what a pity

I do agree that as a paid customer I feel voting in the forum is a waste of time and also more and more of my questions in various topics are just not answered or the priority/ backlog is not visible to us so it feels like it's going nowhere.
I've seen several topics and complains like this very one but staff gives an impression of being too busy to improve and that's a red flag which becomes very visible to customers, so I Believe more transparency and action is needed or making it more easy for existing customers to contribute more apps and influence the strategy through a serious app voting system.
I stopped suggesting apps to the wishlist because the existing apps in wishlist are waiting for too long without any follow up like nobody from the staff cares anymore. And I want to think I'm wrong.

Your post seem to imply we ignore the hard work, but what I think is rather the customers are concerned with staff priorities and worry of the status quo or regression in quality.
There are currently thousands of topics in the wishlist section and no way to see clearly if any will be on the roadmap in the future. If you then compare with how many apps are in the app store it means it would take decades before current wishlist can even partially be addressed.
The staff also mentioned they have more work so cannot deliver interesting apps or apps requiring more complex setup, which raise the natural concern of the customers who see bugs being introduced and dont see more popular apps be included.
So yeah Cloudron has an incredible value but wouldn't be nice to be able for customers to have more influence at least the apps to be picked? Or at least to cleanup the wishlist from the apps that are waiting for too long in the forum to at least not create false hopes.
And as you say packaging Cloudron apps is a challenge but then what is done to simplify this or to call for contributors?
What is done to motivate more customers? Even the referral program was cancelled.
There is of course lot of work around quality and maintenance of apps. This is I believe understood by the customers but yet doesn't invalide the complaints.

@plusone-nick said in Focus on Business Apps:

imo the main issue in regards to new apps is the developer experience/on-boarding

Cloudron has had their own "standardized" method for packaging apps for many years now and have basically failed in facilitating a thriving marketplace for Open Source and new custom apps. Way before Supabase, Coolify and others "We"/Cloudron have had: Server/Runtime, Auth, DBs, Backups, DNS & so on readily available with absolutely no streamlined method to build an app using Add-On pieces and simply launch it.
...

And don't get me started with the fact that we still don't have a single "no code/low code" APP/PAGE builder! No lie it makes me lose sleep at night...We can design a UI with Penpot, build databases with several options, build workflows with n8n, do AI stuff with Typebot/Open WebUI but I only have fucking wordpress to build a page!? (excuse my french & no offense WP but really!? it's basically 2025!!)

...

I know, I know before anyone says it! Sounds like a "skill issue" this is all just linux, docker and open standards, languages, protocols so you should know all of this already, its ASSumed that you do...and this is where the problem/current attitude toward "new apps" derives and resides.

...
Don't mistake my passion for hate or anger

TLDR:

1. App/Page Builder
2. Better Docs/Dev Onboarding
3. Compose & Swarm Implementation/Unified Dashboard

I pray this does not continue to fall on deaf ears...Especially since I am willing and able to contribute...
Everyone is here for a mutually beneficial relationship, let's keep that the focus or part ways amicably.

For points 1 and 2, I totally feel you. Anyway there is some hope and I want to share my experience below.

as an experienced developer and devops person, I have to admit it requires some skillset/experience and patience in order to be able to make the effort to package an app. As a busy parent, I had cooked a simple python app, very minimal, and packaged it for alpine, to boost my productivity. Then I wanted to host it on my Cloudron and it was not so easy to make it work, due to permissions issues, various errors (exec format etc), failed healthcheck... Despite having a working Dockerfile and docker-compose.yml in local, it took me 2 weeks of spare time to adapt my app for Cloudron. Mostly because my spare time is very limited and my knowledge of Cloudron packaging is limited too, and also I had a goal to only use ChatGPT.

The base Cloudron image is mostly ubuntu based while I wanted to keep alpine as a base image, and despite this difference I could manage to yet install my app on my Cloudron instance while still keeping it minimal

It took me a few ChatGPT prompts + a few evenings to go over all the issues I faced, yet I succeed! I believe the DevEx is quite horrible at this time, but with patience and help from ChatGPT , and good documentation I'm convinced I could tackle any such challenge as long as the effort is realistic and the app is worth it. The more we cook app, the easier it becomes, and the funnier it is.

I will try to share a bit about this effort soon , so at least people can benefit from the learning. What is interesting, when building your own app, with a minimal setup, is that it is possible to avoid to rely too much on Cloudron "magic" as I don't care at all about the base image, etc.

I had to admit that the information I needed to aggregate for the initial prompt to ChatGPT was huge and sourced from many different parts (docs, git...) and is not an effort everyone is willing to take, so it is worth cooking some ChatGPT app for this I believe.

Anyway the good news is that it is possible to have sort of a recipe to repeat this success, i.e by feeding ChatGPT with examples of Cloudron/Dockerfile/start.sh of similar apps; i.e apps made with similar tech stack; + relevant excerpts from the documentation about packaging apps for Cloudron and Cloudron requirements. And in total it took maybe a few hours of prompting to ChatGPT and git/docker push/cloudron install/update to make the whole thing work.

I hope to build maybe one or two more apps for Cloudron, for my own needs, this time I'll focus on apps I didn't build myself like maybe soulseek and others. Maybe in the end I'll have a good tutorial to help people contribute to Cloudron with sensible apps.

I confirm the notification persists also for me (Ubuntu 22.04) despite 2 successive reboots.

I'm also highly interested in such features, to the light of all backup failures faced by few folks including me recently and reported in the support and discussion forums. Could be indeed something as simple as using rclone.

You can backup to a private cloud with Obsidian Git plugin or Syncthing (not a plugin, but available on any machine and even on Cloudron) already , I do it for years and because I also sync many other things with Syncthing, I feel I do not need a specific app for Obsidian sync. Just Syncthing works well for tons of stuff like even replace Dropbox to sync GBs worth of Video/Pics/Music/Docs..., etc.
Once you give Syncthing (which is free) a try, you won't need much of any other sync app

I'm just migrating from Contabo Storage to Hetzner because of issues with Contabo... and I hope I won't face your issues folks ! I'll keep you posted

@joseph : for now I'm using a cron job (code below) and Cloudron API to check every 10 min which app is down and restart it, is it possible to mimic some basic autoRestart as part of Cloudron platform instead?
That would be nice to free ourselves from maintaining scripts like below even if I truly love scripting and fixing problems myself

#!/bin/bash
API_TOKEN="<REDACTED>"
CLOUDRON_URL=${CLOUDRON_WEBADMIN_ORIGIN}
APPS="<APP_ID> <APPNAME.MYDOMAINE.TLD>
<ANOTHER_APP_ID> <APPNAME.MYDOMAINE.TLD>"
echo "$APPS" | while read id url; do
  status1=$(curl --max-time 15 -s -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code}" "https://$url")
  status2=$(curl --max-time 15 -s -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code}" "https://$url")
  if [ "$status1" -ne 200 ] && [ "$status2" -ne 200 ]; then
    curl --max-time 5 -s -X POST "$CLOUDRON_URL/api/v1/apps/$id/restart" -H "Authorization: Bearer $API_TOKEN" \
    && echo "$url restarted ✅" \
    && php /app/data/scripts/send_email.php <EMAIL>  "Cloudron Healtcheck" "Service at $url was automatically restarted!"
  fi
done

FYI the migration to Hetzner Storage Box coming from Contabo Object Storage was worth it and fixed all failures related to backups whether it was in term of stability or duration.
I didn't encounter issues yet, despite I'm using encrypted backups and i've plenty of apps including Nextcloud but I don't have as much data on it.

I've also lost quite some time kicking accounts and repositories,
in the end I've combined some of the options below (don't forget the [service] section marker and also restart after the changes !)

[service]
DISABLE_REGISTRATION = True
REGISTER_MANUAL_CONFIRM = True
EMAIL_DOMAIN_ALLOWLIST = XX_your_domain_here_XX,cloudron.local
DEFAULT_USER_IS_RESTRICTED = True

It's overkill if all are used at the same time, but depending on the needs and paranoia, it can be useful

I'm too interested. I need something simple and git feels very complicated and provides a messy ux for simple things and errors. Fossil was advised to me and i'd like to try

@Potherca Thanks for the inspiration ! I forgot that Cloudron had an API. Good to know, then using the API TOKEN created through user's Cloudron profile, a simple CURL could be enough
curl https://YOUR_CLOUDRON_DOMAIN/api/v1/notifications -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_TOKEN" and that could be used with Changedetection or anything like n8n also

I've switched from Contabo to Hetzner for storage/backup, I'll let you know if that improves things.

I tend to think the right solution for now is in the middle of prioritizing the right apps for Cloudron core team, while also having more community contributors and docs to make it easy to package new apps with sane defaults without help of Cloudron staff, relying on scripts or templates to rely on to avoid too long feedback loops between Cloudron staff and users.

I'm myself interested to help packaging a few apps for Cloudron as I have the skills, I love Cloudron, and I'm Developer/DevOps/SRE very focused on automation/docs and eliminating chore and repetitive tasks. I'm building a small app for my needs right now and I'll likely package it for Cloudron as a custom app, then I bet it will build me some more experience to contribute back to package other apps.

Before finishing this post, it would be very customer-friendly to maybe have a known roadmap of such apps Cloudron staff is busy packaging and the ones for which the staff sees an interest but lacks time, and where community effort is welcome. Having maybe the staff delegating the packaging for some apps to its enthusiastic users will spread the knowledge and increase the speed to ship.

I do agree that I'd love to see at least 2/3x more apps being packaged in Cloudron every year

For most app upgrades installed on my instance, the full changelog is shown in the notifications tab, but not for Calibre-Web.

Is it possible to fetch the full changelog and include it in the notification area as for other apps?

Hey
This relates to a bunch of issues mentioned recently in Support in https://forum.cloudron.io/topic/12535/repeated-backup-failures-with-an-app/10?_=1728054597143

I noticed a few things recently:

• Backups were sometimes failing with a notification.
• My remote backup storage was filling up without knowing.
• Backup cleanup was failing in Cloudron for a long time.
• Some cleanup tasks were queued without notification, it was telling something wrong about the general state of things.
• Backup would suddenly take very long time, going from 30min usually to something like 10 hours and many retries. No notification.

Both were related but I had no idea about those because we get no notification in Cloudron regarding the failures of backup cleanup. It's only when going to backups page then checking the listing of retention that I could see those are failing.

It could prevent disasters if we were notified about those issues which are sadly likely hidden under the carpet for now among a few users.

What do you think ?

@bazinga I had similar issues in recent days using Contabo Object Storage on a Contabo VPS.
I ended up fixing it all simply switching to a different storage solution, here Hetzner Storage Box through SSHFS, and that solved most of my pains.
If you can, try that and save yourself some time and suffering.

every day I'm opening my Cloudron dashboard and filtering all apps with a specific tag.
I'd like to avoid the manual filtering of apps associated with specific tags, for instance I would like a permalink with the tags as query parameters at the end of the apps URL, something like : https://my.cloudron.domain/#/apps?tags=cron,dailycheck

Does such thing exist or is it possible to implement it? I can alternatively make some user script for this as a workaround, but I'd like to get this kind of feature out of the box.

Thanks in advance