I guess lots of people use caprover. I thought I'd try it out because I like fiddling with things. So, I installed. It worked fine. At first. Then, one morning, it wouldn't load. Just a mysterious error message on the Dashboard, "Something bad happened". So, a lengthy dive into the incomprehensible world of troubleshooting Docker began. There's no real answer. So many others with slight variations of what might be my problem. No real authoritative source of Help. Just, try this, try that. Many searchers end up reinstalling everything. I considered the same. Then I wondered when my caprover install would suddenly crap out again, and I'd lose my work. Again. So forget it. No more caprover.

You know what hasn't crapped out? Cloudron. I don't know how the Team does it, but keeping everything working is so worth the Subscription.

Cloudron for the win. Cloudron to the moon. Cloudron rules.

I was perusing the Cloudron App Store, and just admiring the presence of some of these apps:
Weblate, Confluence, The Lounge, Taiga (Taiga! I mean, for real!), SOGo, Phabricator, OpenProject, Moodle, MediaWiki, Invoice Ninja 5, Gogs (or for that matter, Gitlab or Gitea), DokuWiki... I mean, over the years, I was wanting to run various apps that managed hosts like Webfaction (I started with them in 2008) didn't have available. This prompted my slow slog into self-hosting, self-installing, self-managing VPSes, lots of crash and burns, lots of learning about limits and how to work around or with them... some of these apps in the list were major victories for me to get installed and running. Some, I never did get installed and running on my own machines. I just think it's so cool that here they are, on Cloudron, ready for anyone to easily get up and running. I am grateful for all that I learned along the way, but what a treat for new people, of any age, to come across Cloudron and have all these apps at their fingertips!

I just want to say thanks!

For some of them, like Weblate, do you a way to see where traffic is coming from for them? Like, are there analytics indicating"Weblate searches are coming from companies, or universities, or research labs"? Do you have any targeted advertising for any of these apps on Cloudron, or has word-of-mouth in general been enough? Just curious, no need to spend any time looking it up.

Some recent posts have dealt with issues due to running out of space. I too had this challenge when I first started , and it was constraining to say the least. I eventually moved up to larger VPSes (my current one has 708GB), which allowed me to try different apps. However, apps like Peertube and Mastodon and Cubby all start taking up lots of space, more than before.

To help with this I started using the free tier of object storage offered by Scaleway, who gives you up to 75GB free! Amazing! But you know what, even with that I started hitting the limit after a few months.

So, now that I was using Object Storage, that got me looking for other ways it might help. My search led me to Minio - self-hosted object storage!? Cool. I also frequent lowendtalk and serverhunter, which eventually led to me snag a KS-1 from OVH/KimSufi. On this I installed Minio, using both the Minio instructions, but also this site was super helpful. I lucked out and discovered that my 1TB VPS was actually a 2TB drive. Double cool.

You may have seen some of my posts on this forum asking for help to get the various apps working with Minio. Thanks to all who helped! And let me tell you... I have set up my various Wordpress sites (using Media Cloud), Mastodons, Peertubes, and now the new XBackBone app, and OBJECT STORAGE IS LIT.

The best thing, for me, is that I can now back up ALL my Cloudron apps and not worry about how much space they are taking up because most of the media is stored in my Minio. I notice this most with Peertube, of course, but also Mastodon. The way I've set mine up, within a few hours it had several GBs of data. Backing all this up took forever, and in some cases, the backups wouldn't work because of either how long it took, or due to some file issue. But, the apps back up nicely, and their media is already on the Minio instance.

The most recent coolness is discovering XBackBone. I had no idea what that was. I had to google what "XShare" was... and holy smokes, what a lifesaver. I take tons of screenshots, and sometimes lose track of where they are. But with XShare uploading to XBackBone which I've set up to use my Minio (meaning the screenshots go straight to its bucket). Amazing!

I'm assuming that the Minio offered by Cloudron will be just as useful. Give it a try! So, grab one of those KS-1s (took me months), install Cloudron in it, and you're set!

As I've been looking for WhatsApp replacements I came across Beeper. Now, it doesnt' actually replace WA; it is however a pretty nifty looking unified chat hq, built on Matrix, and it self-hostable. They even provide a great Ansible playbook over at github - https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy.

Just to repeat myself - this doesn't replace any chat services, but it provides a way to use many different chat services in one interface. I've tried things like this back in the day and never really liked it, but for some reason this one looks promising, probably because it's based on Matrix, which is something I'd like to use more anyway, and see wider adoption.

Looks like it is pretty much ready to plug in to Cloudron too, but those with the skillset!

@nebulon If I understand the dynamics introduced by an open source licence like AGPL, someone having the access to the source code, and in fact having the source code, does not make them a "user" of Cloudron. They simply have the software and can install it and do whatever. But when they have problems, as they surely will because of Docker, where will they turn to? Most likely the original creators of the software... and when you and @girish can't help because of other time constraints, I can imagine the complaints and badmouthing that would follow. This would potentially have the effect of Cloudron (the subscription service) getting a bad name, losing customers, and eventually going out of business. So it makes sense to me that you've tightened up the licence so that the amazing user experience can remain intact and manageable.

I am not an open source purist, starting from the fact that I have no control over the VPS I rent on which I run Cloudron. It is, as someone in your chats said, a compromise for a purist. For the rest of us who don't want to pay an opaque behemoth company anything, Cloudron is simply the best. And it has the open source spirit, if not the correct licence on every bit of code. And importantly, the software actually works, a theme that I've repeated a few times on different threads. I applaud the Cloudron team for making decisions to enable them to keep the software open AND working.

Glad to be part of a community with people like you!
A balmy 18C down here in southern France!

Most of the apps I install on my Cloudron rarely change from their location, or, their initial domain name. The auto-backup feature is fantastic too (I'm using Scaleway).

From time to time I do turn off apps, partly for space reasons, or to make room in RAM while I try out a few other apps. Before doing so, I like to backup just that one app I'm going to turn off. I've then had situations where, after some time has passed, I'll forget if I did back up this or that app, but I have to admit, trying to look up the long convoluted name (which is thankfully possible in Cloudron) and then finding the same in my Scaleway backups, to verify, is tedious enough that I take a chance and don't back up, or I just back up again and thus use up space that wasn't needed.

What would really speed things up for me is if the backups for each app (both individually backed up and when part of a full backup) could include the location (the domain, or a truncated domain) and the name of the app installed. The backup name is already helpful by including the date 2021-03-08-220003-295/app_4145s2c0-hbs57-2g8n-kiw3-2h89si6d82y9_v0.4.0. But, maybe this is just me, keeping track of which domain+app has which long convoluted name is a bit of a hassle. A backup name like 2021-03-08-220003-295/example-com_vikunja_v0.4.0 would make things sooo much easier for me to quickly visually check, verify, and find backups.

I also tend to prune existing backups in my Scaleway buckets by hand, and a naming convention like this would be super helpful for me to be able to immediately see which app is where and has been backed up how many times and when most recently.

NOTE: I've just discovered that in the Backups pane of an apps Dashboard I can download the most recent backup configuration (Download Backup Configuration), and this configuration json file INCLUDES the location in brackets at the end of the filename, like so - app-backup-config-2021-03-09-08-14-31 (subdomain.example.com).json! -Including that location in the backup file name too would be super helpful.

FWIW, when I looked at cloudron.io, there is no mention of being able to (possibly) package any app I want and run it. There is a specific offer of running production ready apps. So, I pay for and support what Cloudron offers; I've never paid for the Wishlist.

Ever since the Wishlist started, I've watched with keen interest. But I've also viewed it as just that, a wishlist. I found it quite generous of the Cloudron team to even openly offer the chance of user-demanded apps. On the other similar platforms (Caprover, Yunohost, even FLAP, but less so as FLAP has a strict app offering), there is the potential for anyone to package any app they want... but if you've tried those you will know that the chances those apps launching, much less working after an update, are very low! So, the fact the Cloudron has actually listened to User wishes (along with the awesome help of many Users) and packaged apps is incredible.

I think I get the allure of KVM images/VM Containers. I imagine that would be a ton of work to rework every currently functioning app into such a format. I also feel like this would turn Cloudron into more of an actual Enterprise-oriented company, rather than one that caters to users like me. Mostly because Wordpress, Ghost, Nextcloud, most of the chat apps, heck, even Mautic, Odoo and SOGo don't need the techiness of a KVM image to just be used. The sort of apps that would benefit from this are probably apps I don't really need, or would use*. And if those ignore the built-in LDAP and email services... well, that ain't Cloudron anymore (for me!)

@marcusquinn I'm curious which apps you are thinking about that are currently impossible to package for Cloudron. For example, I was checking out https://www.egroupware.org/en/download and they have already gone the Container route. There are a few LMSes too, whose names I don't recall at the moment, who seem to prefer a Container approach rather than just a docker-compose container approach.

This just came through my Mastodon instance. https://social.gitea.io/@gitea/107576791626052697, and the link within that https://nlnet.nl/project/Gitea/

This is something I hadn't even thought about before, but apparently it's getting traction. Cool.

Yes, and no. I followed Digital Ocean tutorials, and others from different sites, and conceptually there was a lot I didn't understand. This was challenging when something broke and I didn't even know what happened. But over time the tuts made more sense, the terminology was sticking, the concepts became clearer, but the amount of work and time needed to maintain and monitor the server didn't decrease much. The new Ghost works really really nice compared to how it started, and if that is all you will have running on the $5 server then you should be fine. Just always make backups of the Ghost app and assume at some point something will go wonky, or you will even get hacked, and learn from the experience. Restore from a backup and get back at it.

On top of the server though you have domain/DNS issues to understand and maintain. This can be tricky too, but over time it all gets clearer.

That said, using Cloudron is such a treat. Because I tinkered around on my own for awhile, I now better understand what Cloudron is doing, and how and why, and so it makes it that much nicer to use. But if you are starting from zero, then it is still a great way to get your Ghost site up and running. You could always familiarize yourself with webserver things locally while using MAMP or LAMP on Linux or...XAMPP (or whatever the windows version is called); and get used to servers locally with VirtualBox or VMWare and spin up an Ubuntu image and use it as a test server.

I will add that using Cloudron to run a Ghost app is advantageous in that you will also have the option for the built-in email server, and the option to install other apps that use Apache rather than nginx, or for that matter, php instead of nodejs; I still find it challenging to run php apps that would usually run well under Apache on an nginx server if the main app is a Ghost app, and vice versa, getting a Ghost app to run under Apache so that the other php apps can remain undisturbed. Cloudron makes this mixing of apps seamless.

Not sure how related this is, but my SSHFS mounts are also not working, recently. Just saying.

@ruihildt Hi, I'm signing up at Kagi as I type, and they ask how I heard about them. Do you mind if I give them the url to your post here? Otherwise I'm just going to say, "Cloudron forums".

@scooke AANNNDDD, it's not working anymore. Same thing, the two Volumes had the red dots, were not remounting. Should I make a new post about how I can figure out what's wrong with my Volumes disconnecting and not remounting (Ubuntu 18, SSHFS)?

It's working so far. The reason I asked is because I wondered if the initial failure of the first Volume to remount was due to more than one sshfs connection to that VPS from my Cloudron, using two different users. This time, I used the same user. So far so good.

Jellyfin is more for the movies, tv shows, and music videos, but also some music. But I thought I'd reinstall Navidrome to use it with just the music directory and save time (no need to re-upload it all somewhere again).

@jdaviescoates Thanks for the input. Do you think this will work: One VPS, but mounted as two Volumes each with a unique path. My direct example is that my Jellyfin has access to the Volume using a path to a vast media directory (/home/user/media/). But I'd like to reinstall Navidrome and have it access only the Music folder in that vast media directory (/home/user/media/music/). Will this work? Or will I stumble upon some weird remote volume conflict?

@nebulon I believe that I was doing so from within the Storage menu in the Jellyfin Cloudron dashboard - the Volume was visible under "Mounts", but it didn't seem to work. I then checked the Volumes in the Cloudron dashboard and saw that the Volume had a red circle, but remounting didn't remount it. In the end, I just deleted the initial Volume and re-added it, and then re-added it to the Jellyfin Storage->Mounts section. All I needed to do then was get Jellyfin to rescan the folders, which worked this time. The big question I suppose really is - why did the Volume unmount, and why wouldn't it remount.

@scooke Well, Because the initial Volume wasn't mounting, I had gone ahead and made new Volumes. But none of these seemed to work with Jellyfin, even though all the deets are the same (except the Volume name because I hadn't deleted the non-mounting original Volume yet.)

I somehow checked Jellyfin logs and there were lines about not being able to find the files using the original external Volume paths. OK, I thought attaching a new Volume and restarting the Jellyfin app would have set the new Volume ok.

So, I finally deleted the original non-mounting Volume. and made a new one, with the same name, and NOW, things appear to be working. The folders are refreshing, the movies are playable as are the music files and music videos.

Was there some other place to set the media paths??

Anyway, it seems to be working now. Strange.

Playback Error
This client isn't compatible with the media and the server isn't sending a compatible media format.

I'd read every help forum I could before coming back here. I'm mounted an external volume, it is mounted, the VPS is fine, I uploaded a bunch of media files (movies, music videos, audio files like mp3 and FLAC, ebooks, jpegs, the whole lot). At first, everything worked jimdandy,

Then today. This error popped up. I checked the Volumes and it was red, and it won't remount. So, I just remade a new one. It mounts, exact same directory, but I changed the user to root thinking that might fix any permissions issues. The same error appears. And, the folders won't refresh. I can see that the files are all there (from an ssh session to that VPS), but refreshing won't make them appear.
**I should say that I tried restoring to a Save from 2 weeks ago thinking some update may have borked things, so this is why the Jellyfin media folders don't show all the media.

I'm not too keen on tons and tons of troubleshooting. This stuff eiher works and I use it, or, it doesn't and I dump it and move on. It's just if you have had something similar and can suggest a fix, that would be awesome.

I had such high hopes. Sigh.

Hello again,
I've already used InvoiceNinja to issue a few invoices, but am wondering if someone has used on of the other business/CRM apps on Cloudron to good effect. I'm looking at Chatroot, Dolibarr and EspoCRM (not MonicaHQ), and possibly Ghost and Wordpress. I'll be based in Europe, too, but hopefully will have customers around the world.

Basically, I offer various services. So far most of the time the customer doesn't choose a service from a website, but the scope and quote are done via email. The billing is then done through InvoiceNinja. In IN, I've created the requisite service and cost, and generated the invoice. Plus, the customers have all been people I know, thus far.

But, I'm wanting to start offering these more publicly via my site. And I'd like to include details such as potential customers (a pipeline such as SuiteCRM has), and track communications between myself and them.

Can anyone suggest one of these other apps, and a workflow, please? Or, do I have what I need in InvoiceNinja already? Thank you!

@JC49 said in Backups not showing after recovering server:

pointing to the correct backup individually

To help others who may have a similar situation, can you clarify this please? Where was the correct backup? Local FS or the fileshare? Was it one of the older 5 backup, or the newer ones? How did you point to it; through each app's Backup/Restore dashboard?