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.

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.

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

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

@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 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

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 ?

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

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

@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.

@girish it could be an option to do it manually the first time for security reasons, with login keyring asked once.
I mean I'd like that the option is at least given , and of course not hardcoding the passphrase in the form.

I had no problem using Contabo Object Storage and VPS for Cloudron .. until Murphy's law enter the game:

• an outage in September broke availability in Nuremberg Data center and so my backups and my Cloudron instance were unavailable... Panic mode.... And nothing I could see or do. Contabo offered no support because their support page was broken too without failover... That tells a lot.

• few weeks later my dns resolution on Cloudron failed and causes all kind of issues and root cause was the default dns set by Contabo on my VPS, replacing them was needed.

• Object storage was flaky, causing backup issued on my Cloudron instance. Contabo fixed it on demand but without giving any explanation.

• my backup cleanup were always silently frequently failing in Cloudron for a while and only switching to Hetzner storage fixed that

I still have my VPS at Contabo and my backups at Hetzner but ideally I want to move away from Contabo.
By the way their admin panel is ugly. I do not recommend them other than for cheap non business critical and not performance critical stuff.

It's cheap for reasons: quality is not there

Is there an update on this?
I'm trying to make a custom bridge :⁠-⁠) which should be simple according to the official RSS Bridge doc.
@girish

Thanks in advance!

oh nice, bringing more fun to Cloudron. I support the idea!

Thanks for the feedback !
For now after purging the path to this specific app snapshot through rclone purge command (and, in the middle of my way, use Cloudron admin UI to cancel the stuck backup task), I could rerun a new backup from a clean state which worked 🥳.
I've attempted a second backup which also worked.
I'll wait til the next day to see if the automatic backup succeed.

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 that my DNS setup on my VPS started to cause issues, but only to the light of problems encountered with Miniflux, Changedetection etc. And mostly caused by outages with my DNS Provider. Sadly it was affecting the stability of several Cloudron apps without understanding the root cause immediately. I could fix most of those issues by switching to other DNS like 1.1.1.1 and 9.9.9.9 yet I believe that if Cloudron could manage or detect such problems for me, it would be even better.

Fortunately I found a blog post online that would give me a clue about the problem https://www.thomasmartens.eu/contabo-dns-lookup-timeouts/ otherwise I could have wasted even more time.

Would it be possible to have some notifications/healthchecks in Cloudron regarding similar external degradations ? Maybe it's already done ?

What do you think ?