
Cloudron is now open source - nebulon
https://cloudron.io/blog/2016-08-29-opensource.html
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gramakri
Co-founder of cloudron here. There is a demo at [https://my-
demo.cloudron.me/](https://my-demo.cloudron.me/) (username: cloudron password:
cloudron). It's hidden deep below the blog post. Happy to answer any
questions.

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machbio
Invalid Username Password for the Demo.. Please Fix it.

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gramakri
Yeah, someone reset the username/password :/ This is why we cannot have nice
things :-)

I just restored the Cloudron, please try again now.

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ocdtrekkie
I would perhaps suggest that you special case the demo to not be able to do
such things. :) People aim to misbehave.

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tmikaeld
How do the security of this compare to for example Sandstorm?

Afaik, Docker is not as isolated from other hosts as Sandstorm is.

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gramakri
The Cloudron is intended to run on a VPS/Single tenant server. Apps get
installed into this server as docker containers (this is so that apps are
isolated from each other). We also have some best practices in place for
Docker containers - read only root fs, non-root user etc. We also have a
change coming up where apps will run with user namespaces (but it is waiting
on a patch from Docker).

At the server level, the Cloudron will only expose ports from the server that
the app requires. For most web apps, this means only port 443 (https) and 80.
The server is otherwise completely locked down.

~~~
tmikaeld
Thanks a lot for the reply, very informative!

There's certainly an advantage in that you can run just about any app since
it's docker based.

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gramakri
We can support a variety of frameworks and languages very easily (thanks to
Docker!):

* GitLab (rails, go)

* Mattermost, Gogs (go)

* Rocket.chat (node/meteor)

* Wordpress, Piwik, Mediawiki, Rainloop (php)

* Irc server (c++)

* Taiga (python)

~~~
tmikaeld
Very nice, do you plan on adding a data-sharing layer on top - like sandstorm
does?

Like for example, a backup app (Ex. Bacula, UrBackup) might need access to
other apps files.

Or maybe a central backup solution for all/each app?

~~~
gramakri
For specific case of backups, apps on cloudron are already encrypted and
backed up automatically to your S3 bucket. This happens at a app level, so you
can restore apps individually as well.

Though, I think you are asking if we some form data picker between apps. Like
ownCloud can expose contacts that can get picked up from some mail app? Most
apps these days expose a REST API. For example, GitLab sends notifications to
Rocket.Chat via webhooks. I can edit files on ownCloud via webdav from my
desktop and my radicale contacts are available via carddav to thunderbird.
There's standards in place for each kind of data access and all these go
beyond web apps.

From what I have seen, even having a simple data-sharing layer require
requires modifications to apps and this is a lot of work. Like sandstorm,
cozy.io also has a interesting data layer but they simply decided to just make
apps of their own mostly I am guessing (just guessing :-) ) the reason is that
it is very hard to modify and more importantly convince existing app authors
to take their changes upstream.

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ocdtrekkie
Really excited to see a new addition to the open source self-hosting platform
space. When we all move towards decentralization, everyone wins.

~~~
gramakri
Thanks :-) As a self-hoster for many years now, I really want to make it
mainstream.

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tmikaeld
It's too bad it only works on Amazon EC2 instances.

Any plans to make it work on bare-metal or proxmox?

~~~
nebulon
We do have plans to support other VPS providers soon for self-hosting.
DigitalOcean most likely to be the next one, as we already have great
experience with their instances. However we will support providers depending
on user requests, so lets us know which ones you would like to see.

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harrisreynolds
How would Cloudron be related to a tool like Dokku (self hosted Heroku through
Dokker)?

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gramakri
Dokku's target audience is developers who want to run web apps. Cloudron's
target audience are the users of the app but want to run the app on their
server (for privacy, ownership, control, pride etc).

If you are a developer today, you probably make a SaaS product using
Dokku/Heroku.

In a Cloudron world, the developer would instead publish the app on the
Cloudron Store
([https://cloudron.io/appstore.html](https://cloudron.io/appstore.html)) and
all people who run Cloudron will automatically get this app (no different from
how smartphones + appstore works). I can simply click and install your app on
_my_ server. Now, currently, people don't self-host because it's too hard to
run your own server. Cloudron is trying to fix that.

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michaelmior
What is a "small", "medium", and "large" instance? The pricing page gives me
no sense of scale and what size of instance I might need.

~~~
gramakri
Ah, my bad. This info is not readily visible on mobile (because it's a hover
tool tip). Will fix that...

Small = 1GB RAM, Medium = 4GB RAM, Large = 8GB RAM. We generally suggest
people to start out with small and take it from there. If your server is
getting overloaded, it will let you know and you can simply upgrade to bigger
model from the UI.

~~~
michaelmior
I wasn't viewing on mobile but I still missed it. Anyway, thanks for the
clarification. I assumed it would be possible to upgrade, but seeing the RAM
limits at least help gives me some intuition as to how much I could run at the
different sizes.

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Sir_Cmpwn
Thanks for not referring to your software as an "OS" like some other projects
posted here recently.

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tmikaeld
*Continue of thread below about data-sharing.

So does this mean that you use official docker images and do not compile your
own?

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gramakri
We build our own docker images. Apps have to be packaged so that no
configuration is required post-installation. For example, the user does not
have to setup databases, configure email, SSO, figure out what needs to be
backed up etc. You just install and you are done. We also have security
requirements for running as non-root user and readonly rootfs. Most upstream
images won't run with readonly.

All apps are opensource
[https://git.cloudron.io/cloudron/](https://git.cloudron.io/cloudron/) *-app .

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tmikaeld
Nice, i tried to register an account on your gitlab (to report an issue) but
didn't get any conformation e-mail.

(OpenProject can't create new projects using cloudron user)

EDIT: Resolved by friendly email ;)

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soperj
Sounds a lot like Openshift from Redhat?

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ocdtrekkie
The key thing is that platforms like Openshift are designed for enterprise
deployment and developer use, while platforms like Cloudron are designed for
personal and consumer use.

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soperj
How? You'd need someone to develop the app you're deploying. Openshift is
pretty straight forward using the gui web interface.

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gramakri
Openshift is more like a PaaS. It's like self-hosting Heroku (and dokku). See
my answer for Dokku -
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12400798](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12400798).
Since this thread got a bit old, feel free to email me at girish@cloudron.io
to discuss further :-)

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pvinis
can i run cloudron on my home server? how?

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gramakri
Currently, no. It is really designed to run on a VPS/EC2.

For ec2,
[https://cloudron.io/references/selfhosting.html](https://cloudron.io/references/selfhosting.html)

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tmikaeld
Oh, too bad - we explicitly run a private cloud.

