alt Hacker NewsCloud in a Bottle: making self-hosting accessible to everyone
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It's sad that open source / open-internet projects always have a clunky design. Here, the main screenshot, at the top, uses a monospaced System font. You might as well display a terminal and it's a wrap. To appeal to broader audiences:
- You both need to trigger the potential OSS contributors, with references to Debian, Ubuntu maybe, and appeal to big donors, which is another topic entirely,
- And ALSO have a design that triggers the broader audiences and therefore, very "turnkey", very packaged, very "Comment like and subscribe", one-click install on your NAS, etc. Privacy is then a characteristic but services are the real features.
I thought that Coolify had centralized auth.
The unified auth + inter-app permissions are the real differentiator vs Coolify/CapRover-style container hosts. Data tiers (local DBs vs S3/R2 archive) also look like the practical way to make Immich/Jellyfin viable without giant managed disks.
Never thought that people on HN would be seriously discussing an obviously vibe coded thing.
I really like the design man!
Like pikapod?
How does it deal with storage? Storage is always the weakest link in self hosting. Having a bunch of stateless containers is ultimately just a fancy docker compose file. Still valuable, but you need a proper story for storage. Ideally all storage would be on individual volumes per app and all backed up etc.
>claude in contibutors >python No, thanks
a similar project which i think is a lot better than this (in fact it's so good i'm jealous of its genius) is https://exe.dev. It feels like something that hasn't really hit the mainstream yet but I suspect everyone will be talking about soon.
Meh. Maybe I'm a grinch, but I don't see this as easier. I have a little NUC running Ubuntu. Putting services on it is easy: PiHole, OwnCloud, Wireguard, etc.
the hardware is problem we all been struggling with
Cloudron?
> Apps are (rootless, hardened) containers, so it can run existing software with minimal changes - and in a reasonably secure sandbox.
WTF? I’m selling you a car with no brakes but it slows down reasonably fast?
> coolify: hosts containerized apps, but every app is an island with its own login and little integration with the host or other apps.
That’s not an issue tho, I want each application to be a separate login, so I can have one pointed to a different subdomain or domain not all in one login and location.
> nextcloud: slow and unreliable, and more enterprise-targeted now
What a load of bull.
I've been interested in something like this for awhile. Cloud or self hosting in-a-box. Should be simple for layman.
Seems weird not to mention Umbrel.
yunohost?
I remember back when I first got into self-hosting (over a decade ago), I had a Netgear READYNAS. People made a small amount of plugins you could install. But the CPU was ARM before that was cool (I think mine was actually SPARC!) so it was a lot of effort to get things to compile, so plugins were usually quite outdated.
Then I decided to painfully break out of vendor lock-in, built my own NAS with FreeNAS which was all the rage (still attached to a vendor, but at least I could control the hardware). This was before Docker really took off - the plugins were installed in FreeBSD jails. It worked for a while, but again, plugins could be woefully out of date and broken, upgrading the OS was a pain and would break all your plugins.
Through the 10+ years of this... I now follow two simple rules: - separate your network storage and application hosting. Yes, it complicates things a little bit with NFS setups but it is a forcing function for a more resilient setup - use the docker container provided by the maintainers or LinuxServer.io. Vendor maintained wrappers can be initially helpful but end up as a form of tech debt when they're abandoned or neutered - especially when they're freemium and the company starts looking to squeeze.
The quiet part of self-hosting is that it shifts the responsibility of security to the user. I'm sure cloudinabottle has more sensible defaults than provided docker containers, or builds in reverse proxies etc, but I doubt they're offering to take on liability for data loss or breaches.
The problem I see you'll face are two-fold: 1. Projects like this have the power users self-select away from it and those who need a lot of hand-holding to self-select into it. If I know how to configure and deploy a docker container already I have no incentive to contribute. ReadyNAS got around this by having folks charge for their plugins (that were just OSS projects packaged up for their OS) but then it ruins the appeal, they likely only got away with it because they were only a couple of bucks and you were already locked in to the ecosystem via the hardware. 2. If the hosted aspect actually makes you money, required for the project to be continued long term, capitalism will ensure that incumbent cloud providers take that away from you by offering ready-made instances at your cost-price, like they did with redis, elasticsearch etc.
Note that these are only issues if you're motivated by making a profit, or even a cost-neutral project. But if this is a charitable exercise backed by an entity that doesn't need the money, I wish you all the best - more things that let people dip their toes in are good! The cloud is all rent-seeking subscriptions and even with the recent supply shortages: fast, small, low-power compute is incredibly cheap these days, especially old business/mini machines.
"Forjejo"
No offense, but this is not accessible to everyone. Seriously, take a look at the setup instructions and tell me with a straight face that a 4 year old could set this up.
https://cloudinabottle.org/docs/setup/shared_homeserver.html
There's no reason this couldn't be made as simple as double clicking a .exe and then the whole thing gets setup.
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How do I reach out to you? We're building something that you might want to be a part of. (The "Safebox" comes with all the software you need, and you can just clone its AMI on AWS etc.) Would love to have a conversation.
If you want to message me, find my email on https://qbix.com/about
It's weird seeing someone trying to promote self-hosting, while building everything with Claude.
> In the pre-cloud days, open source worked - authors distributed their software, and everyone "hosted" it for themselves (i.e. ran it on their own PC)
This is just rose tinted vision of the past. None of the software of the past had the capability, reliability or robustness of modern sass.
In the age of LLM agents, still going for Docker/Podmam on anything besides local development box seems like a weird choice.
Docker has poor tooling for network level security between the containers, has issues with different runtimes per container, etc.
It is just a bit primitive if you want to expose multiple services to the internet on the same server. One of those apps will get compromised and then all the others will follow.
If you want a decent self hosted server, ask your frontier LLM agent of choice to configure kubernetes (on something like k3s) with mandatory userns mapping so nothing runs as root on the host, default deny firewall so inter-container communication is as locked down as possible, and if your router supports, set up VLANs so none of the containers can access your other devices on the LAN. Use something like backrest to handle backups, alertmanager and Grafana for monitoring, Keel for auto updates. Also consider separating ingress for public and internal services and use Tailscale with split DNS to acces the internal entrypoint. Set up Crowdsec as WAF and subscribe to their free blocklists to filter out bots. Ask it to set this all up using Ansible, so it can be maintained.
While this would be extremely time consuming to set up and maintain by hand, an agent can do and test it in a few hours.
Curious how this compares to Cosmos Cloud (https://cosmos-cloud.io/).
I picked it a few years ago for much the same reason as anyone else (sick of this shit), and it's main attraction to me was it being a turnkey solution that focus security so i wasn't as likely to completely fuck everything important up.
I think a "simple" installation package would be very attractive to most people, and while cosmos has a lot of growing to do in order to be that, I'm still pretty happy with it.
I'm even more happy to see more in this space, because I'm just at the point of "do i stick with cosmos or do i start rolling it all myself" and god the leap is terrifying if you're thinking of exposing to the internet. I get it, but at the same time it feels like you're always one missed config away from a potential nightmare, and that's after the "welp guess this is my second job" problem.