You already have the option to install apps from others in a general sense because of Docker.

I pay for Cloudron not just because it is Docker-based, but because of how easy the devs and admins and owners have made it to use. I think adding unsupported apps to the mix even more will distract from the appeal of Cloudron. The extra apps that are available are there because the app is in the pipeline to being added to the official Cloudron store; they have been/are being worked on by people who like the Cloudron approach and want to add to that, and not to a Docker-experience in general.

The price jump from no-support to support with nethserver is a huge jump from 48€ to 250€! I think Cloudron has a good pricing structure because they have limited what they have to support. To address one of your first points, I left Yunohost exactly because of how many low level quality apps that they have, and all the hassles and problems that approach introduced. I wouldn't want to see Cloudron go that route. I like the line being thick! I am already receiving all that I hope for from Cloudron.

All that being said, I think we already have a pretty good 'community repository' of helpful users and super helpful admins. For anything that I want to do that is beyond what Cloudron offers, I just tinker away on my other VPS.

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.

I love Cloudron. I love the increasing number of apps offered. But will there eventually be too many for the Cloudron team to manage? I'd hate to see Support quality, or quality in general, decrease just for quantity. If there is to be a limit, how will it be determined? By install number? By usage? By active maintenance by the git repository/project owners (not Cloudron)?

@jdaviescoates I used https://wordpress.org/plugins/all-in-one-wp-migration/, moving a wordpress app from a regular LAMP stack install to my Cloudron, and it went very smoothly. Size of the *.wordpress file was over 500MB but it went well.

You can add me too! @scooke@lenote.eu.

I have a VPS with 24Gb of RAM. I have 19 apps. When I look at the Graphs the RAM usage is no more than 5 GB. But when I went to add the 20th app (Monica) I received this popup warning:
This Cloudron is running low on resources. Please upgrade to a server instance with more memory. Alternately, free up resources by uninstalling unused applications.
But my Graphs show that I have 20 GB of RAM unused. Is the warning about spikes or something?

Is it taking into account the RAM requirements for each installed app which would total 29.5GB? Is this why I get this warning?

My suggestion might be applicable to a few people: I like to try out the various apps available on the Cloudron App Store and often reuse a domain to do so. Currently I have to click on the installed app square, scroll down to Uninstall, which is the 11th option to the left of the info window, Uninstall, then go back to App Store, choose an app, then choose the install Location, and then wait for it to install, then either make a new login or am assigned a new login for that app.

What would be really nice is an 12th option called Switch (or Change, or whatever). While I am in the app window which displays the current domain/location, I could choose Switch, and a mini App Store appears in the box, and I can click on one, and click the blue Switch button. This then would start a process of uninstalling the current app, deleting caches or whatever the normal Uninstall process does, and then automatically installs the new app.

I have no idea how complicated it would be to then also preserve the user info, but if possible, then I could keep using the same email rather than having a new one, and this would also help me keep my password manager tidier - no more multiple copies of sign-in info for the same domain.

If it doesn't or can't happen, I understand. There are probably more pressing upgrades needing to done, and I am a happy Cloudron user anyway. But, this would be super handy for me since I often switch out apps using the same domain.

I like this feature of 5.3.1 - Do not count stopped apps for memory use!

@will I was looking for this actually 30 minutes ago! It is in the lower right of the browser window, the footer of the Cloudron admin window, where you can see the 2020 and Cloudron about centered.

© 2020   Cloudron       Forum                                v5.0.6

You could install LimeSurvey and give it a try for all of us!

@Felix Oops, it was the post about GNU Social that had the bit of text I could see in my head:

INSTALLING
git clone https://git.cloudron.io/murgero/gnu-social gnu-social
cd gnu-social
cloudron install --image=mitchellurgero/org.urgero.gs:latest
Or just clone, build in docker and install like any other non-store app.

A similar process then would apply for yours.

1% of me believes you could maybe be him. That's the wonder of the internet!

I actually have only one Cloudron installation, but I did have two at one point. On my current Cloudron installation I have a ton of apps running, a whole mix. a good portion are managed under one email address, but the rest are just app by app. In reality, most of them don't need to use email. There are still a few more whose email is managed by MXRoute (even though they are assigned an email address by Cloudron I don't use).

@ultraviolet This is super! I thought I saw a few lines of how to clone, build and install this app. Was it here on this forum, or was it in the README.md at Github? Could you post those again please?

Do you ever get teased about Star Wars or trainspotting or riding a motorbike across Central Asia (if you are the own of the gh repository)?

@Felix From what I can say off the top of my head, an email is created per app, and uses whatever domain it's been installed at, so cloudronuser@example.com . If there are more than one at a domain, then the email address becomes app1.email@example.com and app2.email@example.com. Once installed some apps let you set the admin email address inside, so you could use the same address for a number of apps. But it is nice, if you use subdomains, to use a variation of the cloudron-suggested email address. You can change it too after its been installed from the app dashboard in Cloudron (not just the in-app dashboard).

So yep, you could install many Ghosts on one domain, but you'd have to choose a new subdomain for each, you can't have more than one app accessible at the same domain (this is the same situation if you were rolling everything by hand too). I have several Ghost and Wordpress installations, some on the same domain (using subdomains). Each Ghost installation is it's own app though (plus whatever else is needed for the app to run), they don't build on each other, which is the Docker-side of things (everything is in its own container).

Yes, it is fun!

@Felix Hi there, yes, you did it! Leaving the Location window blank means the Ghost app will be reachable by the plain domain name, like example.com. Most of mine are installed like that, but a few I actually use the Location, like test.example.com.

For the Location option to work though you need to have a wild card DNS entry, like *.example.com resolving to your VPSs IP. Also, if you want www.example.com to lead to just example.com, then your DNS must have a CNAME entry www for example.com. This is set up at your domain registrar. You can message me directly if you want about this.

@murgero So, the $60 /year VPS is actual 180 when you go to pay because you are getting that price for a 3-year term. If you buy just year by year then the price is $80. Likewise, the $109 /year is actually $294.30/3yr - you have to buy the 3 year plan. If you don't want to spend 294.30 all at once and prefer year by year then the price is actually $149/1yr. You can see why they got some complaints.

@plusone-nick I've been with ssdnodes for a long time, and yeah, the sales are always happening. And sadly, the price often listed is the yearly price of a 3-year term! They had a blog post awhile back where they said they had received backlash about the pricing (people didn't like to see a low price and think that was available for just one year only to discover that is the yearly price when 3 years are bought!) and were going to try listing the yearly price upfront (which is higher than the yearly 3-year price, obviously) for a little while to see if sales improve. I guess they decided it was better to show the yearly 3-year price after all. Anyway, I've been using them for awhile, and for the most part I have no complaints. But I've never done any exhaustive comparisons either. I can tell you right now that my Cloudron dashboard tells me that, with my ssdnodes 24GB VPS with a 4GB swap, I am using about 4GB of ram with hourly spikes to 7.5 GB of ram, and a fairly constant 16% of CPU usage, for a Cloudron running (are you ready): 9 WP sites, Pixelfed, Analytics, Bitwarden, Matrix + RIOT, 5 LAMP, Etherpad, Wallabag, SOGO, Vikunja, Mediawiki, plus email for 3 or 4 of those apps. I guess I thought that running so many things that the percentages would be higher than 50 or so; it gave me the impression I could install more. But with the apps listed above, I need to have at least 4 of the 2096MB apps turned off for Cloudron to run without hiccups. But still, thats a lot of stuff on one VPS, I think!

@blavkm said in Pixelfed:

social.mobiledads.live

This seems to have the clearest explanation, especially the parts near the bottom: https://discourse.joinmastodon.org/t/how-to-replace-logos/1553/15

But since this is becoming more of a Mastodon thread rather than purely Pixelfed, maybe you could repost as a new topic.

@jdaviescoates FWIW, I also recently found a mysterious plugin in my WP installation, but no logins or anything. I determined it must have snuck in on a theme I installed for testing, even though it was from the built-in theme picker. So I deleted all the extra themes, the plugins (Sorry, I forget what they were called, there were two).

This isn't exactly what you are looking for, but Omeka is pretty good at hosting ebook and other digital document collections. It just requires more work to make everything searchable, collectionable, and I think for reading there is a built-in PDF reader, or it uses your browser? https://omeka.org/classic/docs/GettingStarted/UsingOmeka/

I like this feature of 5.3.1 - Do not count stopped apps for memory use!