@m4nu said:
Thanks for testing and sharing your thoughts, everyone! 🙌🤗
@alento said:
I just set up a Bookstack instance. Liking what I am seeing of your new service so far ... just one slight issue. No email? Bookstack uses it for email verification of new users, so that is kind of a necessary function. How will you handle emails???
Would be best to allow adding one's own email service. I think Bookstack keeps it in some config/env file. Will make sure this is accessible and persistent.
To expand upon this a bit ... first off I am not a dev and therefore badly screw up the terminology, so PLEASE forgive if I use the incorrect terms. My goal is to convey the idea.
I agree completely, it would be best to allow adding one's own email service. That said ...
most (all?) php apps will default to the normal php / server method of sending, without using SMTP settings within the app itself. This seems to be the case with bookstack as it is trying to connect to localhost:10025 to send emails. Maybe it is possible to have a setting for each pod where you can connect a SMTP account for the pod to send emails with? Does that make sense?
Recommended providers: BuyVM - MXroute - LunaNode - Forpsi - IntoVPS
Contact me for all of your Mail-in-a-Box email hosting needs at AnyDomain. I am also a proud reseller of MXroute email.
In my scenario, 100% of my client base is in Australia meaning EU & US aren't really an option for me.
BYOVM allows the user to connect a VPS of their choice in the desired location without PikaPods opening another DC (Win-win in my eyes) Elast.io does this really well, simply by copying a command that adds a public key into their Managed platform
@dylightful said: In my scenario, 100% of my client base is in Australia meaning EU & US aren't really an option for me.
Just ordered the first server in HK. 🤗 Should be ready in a few days.
BYOVM would mean to run custom Docker images in this case? This feature was much-requested in our survey, but I'll skip it for now because it would mean a totally different target market (people who can build and know what Docker images are). Currently the focus is on normal folks, who want to run FOSS apps in a simple way to escape from the usual data harvesting companies. The former market could be served in the future with a different brand.
Simple and secure Borg Backup hosting from $2/month: BorgBase.com
@alento said: most (all?) php apps will default to the normal php / server method of sending, without using SMTP settings within the app itself. This seems to be the case with bookstack as it is trying to connect to localhost:10025 to send emails. Maybe it is possible to have a setting for each pod where you can connect a SMTP account for the pod to send emails with? Does that make sense?
We don't have many PHP apps and if so, we use the projects Docker image. So can't mess with PHP settings. While we could somehow resell email traffice, I don't think that's a good market to get into. Many others already do a good job at that. Like Mailgun, SES, etc.
Simple and secure Borg Backup hosting from $2/month: BorgBase.com
@dylightful said: In my scenario, 100% of my client base is in Australia meaning EU & US aren't really an option for me.
Just ordered the first server in HK. 🤗 Should be ready in a few days.
BYOVM would mean to run custom Docker images in this case? This feature was much-requested in our survey, but I'll skip it for now because it would mean a totally different target market (people who can build and know what Docker images are). Currently the focus is on normal folks, who want to run FOSS apps in a simple way to escape from the usual data harvesting companies. The former market could be served in the future with a different brand.
I think what he meant was to bring his own server like what runcloud/serverpilot does.
If so, that would be outside of PikaPods's goals, right?
@alento said: most (all?) php apps will default to the normal php / server method of sending, without using SMTP settings within the app itself. This seems to be the case with bookstack as it is trying to connect to localhost:10025 to send emails. Maybe it is possible to have a setting for each pod where you can connect a SMTP account for the pod to send emails with? Does that make sense?
We don't have many PHP apps and if so, we use the projects Docker image. So can't mess with PHP settings. While we could somehow resell email traffice, I don't think that's a good market to get into. Many others already do a good job at that. Like Mailgun, SES, etc.
Uhmm, I think that you missed the point ... how am I to even use Mailgun, SES, etc. since that is what your answer refers to? I am not suggesting you 'resell email traffic' but rather have some mechanism for each app to send it's outbound emails. Which, right now, they do not. At least the apps I am using do not. One doesn't need it, but the other certainly does.
Recommended providers: BuyVM - MXroute - LunaNode - Forpsi - IntoVPS
Contact me for all of your Mail-in-a-Box email hosting needs at AnyDomain. I am also a proud reseller of MXroute email.
I don't think there is any modern, sane PHP application not supporting external SMTPs these days.
BookStacks: Enable SFTP access, edit .env file for BookStacks, change SMTP settings there, restart pod, done - it's using external SMTP now.
Sure, (global - per pod) localhost or mail()/sendmail would be more convenience, but then you would need to resell SES/Mailgun/Sendgrid or something and make sure you follow all theirs guidelines, have some log, expose it somewhere, let user configure domain (because we want domains!), make sure user has appropriate DNS entries ( SPF, etc). Then probably vendor lock it to two services or something (you don't want to implement 81758178578) - and people gonna be mad "WHY THERE IS NO SENDGRID!!!!1111". Seems like shit ton of work for almost zero profit... while most apps handle that internally and you just go to settings / .env and edit it there.
@m4nu
Is there a chance that app view would show timestamp (or relative time?) next to Started? I clicked restart, it was so fast that I've never noticed that it worked - visual confirmation like Started (10 seconds ago) would be pretty nice.
@dylightful said: In my scenario, 100% of my client base is in Australia meaning EU & US aren't really an option for me.
Just ordered the first server in HK. 🤗 Should be ready in a few days.
BYOVM would mean to run custom Docker images in this case? This feature was much-requested in our survey, but I'll skip it for now because it would mean a totally different target market (people who can build and know what Docker images are). Currently the focus is on normal folks, who want to run FOSS apps in a simple way to escape from the usual data harvesting companies. The former market could be served in the future with a different brand.
I think what he meant was to bring his own server like what runcloud/serverpilot does.
If so, that would be outside of PikaPods's goals, right?
@alento said:
Uhmm, I think that you missed the point ... how am I to even use Mailgun, SES, etc. since that is what your answer refers to? I am not suggesting you 'resell email traffic' but rather have some mechanism for each app to send it's outbound emails. Which, right now, they do not. At least the apps I am using do not. One doesn't need it, but the other certainly does.
Understand the potential problem. Many apps already allow you to add SMTP details. E.g. Listmonk, a Mailchimp alternative has it in the UI. Bookstack has it in the .env file (which we populate during container creation). For Nextcloud the config.php with SMTP details is also available via SFTP.
It wouldn’t be impossible to populate these settings during setup and start off with email working. Just a bit fragile and some work to set up. Limiting this to a few dozen emails from specific IPs and using a shared domain should be possible too.
So you are probably right and this will be needed eventually. I’ll put it in the “planned” category for now and look into it in a few weeks after the transition from our beta is all done.
Simple and secure Borg Backup hosting from $2/month: BorgBase.com
@Jab said:
Is there a chance that app view would show timestamp (or relative time?) next to Started? I clicked restart, it was so fast that I've never noticed that it worked - visual confirmation like Started (10 seconds ago) would be pretty nice.
Good idea! I can get this data via the existing stats. Can also be useful to debug unstable containers.
Simple and secure Borg Backup hosting from $2/month: BorgBase.com
Thanks for pointing me in the right direction! @Jab
Recommended providers: BuyVM - MXroute - LunaNode - Forpsi - IntoVPS
Contact me for all of your Mail-in-a-Box email hosting needs at AnyDomain. I am also a proud reseller of MXroute email.
@m4nu said: It wouldn’t be impossible to populate these settings during setup and start off with email working. Just a bit fragile and some work to set up. Limiting this to a few dozen emails from specific IPs and using a shared domain should be possible too.
Could you expose the .env or equivalent in the UI? Lots of custom work, though.
@caracal said: Could you expose the .env or equivalent in the UI? Lots of custom work, though.
For now I'm trying to keep all settings in env vars. For some apps you can pass settings with them and it's the best way for containers. In most cases the container will set up a config file based on env vars internally (which is lost when recreating the container).
If an important setting for an image isn't available as env var, I'd file it as enhancement with the image maintainer.
Simple and secure Borg Backup hosting from $2/month: BorgBase.com
@dylightful said: In my scenario, 100% of my client base is in Australia meaning EU & US aren't really an option for me.
Just ordered the first server in HK. 🤗 Should be ready in a few days.
BYOVM would mean to run custom Docker images in this case? This feature was much-requested in our survey, but I'll skip it for now because it would mean a totally different target market (people who can build and know what Docker images are). Currently the focus is on normal folks, who want to run FOSS apps in a simple way to escape from the usual data harvesting companies. The former market could be served in the future with a different brand.
I think what he meant was to bring his own server like what runcloud/serverpilot does.
If so, that would be outside of PikaPods's goals, right?
Negative, more like Cloudron or Elast.io
Yea, but the point is the same, to bring your own server, which is not the goal as @m4nu said.
@dylightful said: In my scenario, 100% of my client base is in Australia meaning EU & US aren't really an option for me.
Just ordered the first server in HK. 🤗 Should be ready in a few days.
BYOVM would mean to run custom Docker images in this case? This feature was much-requested in our survey, but I'll skip it for now because it would mean a totally different target market (people who can build and know what Docker images are). Currently the focus is on normal folks, who want to run FOSS apps in a simple way to escape from the usual data harvesting companies. The former market could be served in the future with a different brand.
I think what he meant was to bring his own server like what runcloud/serverpilot does.
If so, that would be outside of PikaPods's goals, right?
Negative, more like Cloudron or Elast.io
Yea, but the point is the same, to bring your own server, which is not the goal as @m4nu said.
Better you use solutions that you said instead.
It was just a suggestion - Avoids the need (and cost) of opening multiple DC's
I have tried it, they are ready-to-go within about 20 seconds. Love the environment variables settings on the apps before even starting them. With the automatic subdomain creation, I find it a pretty good alternative to the shared hosting auto-installers. One feature I would request is more questions for long-running apps like "Do you really want to pause/delete? This Pod has been running for x days."
Pause this pod. You will still be charged for storage or $1 per month, whichever is higher.
The ability to pause is awesome. And it is solved in a very convenient and intuitive way. I wish VPS providers had a feature like this.
@m4nu I just hope you can actually maintain the updates for all the docker images, because those seem to be the weakest link on many open source projects.
I think it is worth considering an additional environment variable for "private pod" which would set up a server with http auth in front of any web based Pod.
Does the Jupyter pod contain Jupyter Notebook or JupyterLab?
@Losifh said: One feature I would request is more questions for long-running apps like "Do you really want to pause/delete? This Pod has been running for x days."
There is already double confirmation for deleting a pod. Thinking of changing this from the slider to typing the name, as most other sites do. Stopping is pretty harmless, so no confirmation for now. Maybe I'm also misunderstanding the suggestion.
@Losifh said: I think it is worth considering an additional environment variable for "private pod" which would set up a server with http auth in front of any web based Pod.
Not a fan of basic auth, but there could be uses. You'd still end up with a double login.
@Losifh said: Does the Jupyter pod contain Jupyter Notebook or JupyterLab?
Should be Jupyter Lab. It's running the scipy image
@Losifh said: I just hope you can actually maintain the updates for all the docker images, because those seem to be the weakest link on many open source projects.
For now I only use published upstream images. So the main effort is to run a few quick tests and see if the images still works in general and with our setup specifically. May hire part time help to support this part.
Also, some more apps added:
Filerun: light Dropbox alternative with basic support for photos and music (suggested by a fellow LETer)
Matomo: Our second web analytics app
WordPress: second blogging platform. Access to wp-content via SFTP.
Traggo: time tracking tool
And finally, Rocket.Chat got an update after the project cleaned up their image a bit. Previously their start command was a weird bash loop. They moved this into the app now and I hope it's more stable with that.
@Losifh said: I think it is worth considering an additional environment variable for "private pod" which would set up a server with http auth in front of any web based Pod.
Not a fan of basic auth, but there could be uses. You'd still end up with a double login.
If Basic Auth is what I think it is then the 2 ways I would have used it thus far are:
Make an ArchiveBox index private. I was too dumb to figure out the config file and not determined enough to dig deeper.
As a temporary measure when creating a new pod that does not request admin credentials in the environment variables. I recognize that the chances of someone just guessing the pod URL and creating/updating the admin account before I get to it are basically zero, but sometimes I get a little paranoid, especially if I get interrupted.
I'll admit these aren't the best use cases. #1 is literally "I'm too dumb to do it the right way" while I would only use #2 for like 10 minutes per pod.
@fan said:
Just discovered pikapods while browsing some self-hosted threads, signed up but showing $20 in credit instead of 50, is the beta policy changed now?
Yeah, I reduce it to $20 a few weeks ago after the first test server got full. Still generous. Can't update the title here, so sorry for the confusion. Just found out that I can edit the title. The beta will probably finish next week when the US and Asia regions go online. So you were just on time.
Had to close the beta early after someone posted about it on a Chinese forum. 🙈
So it's $5 free starting credit and max 2 pods for free users now. And you can't use a disposable email or proxy to sign up (happened a LOT for those users).
What can I do with/for a thousand or so Chinese users? How many will ever pay? Trying to see this as opportunity, but it's an unexpected situation.
@m4nu said:
Had to close the beta early after someone posted about it on a Chinese forum. 🙈
So it's $5 free starting credit and max 2 pods for free users now. And you can't use a disposable email or proxy to sign up (happened a LOT for those users).
What can I do with/for a thousand or so Chinese users? How many will ever pay? Trying to see this as opportunity, but it's an unexpected situation.
@m4nu said:
Had to close the beta early after someone posted about it on a Chinese forum. 🙈
So it's $5 free starting credit and max 2 pods for free users now. And you can't use a disposable email or proxy to sign up (happened a LOT for those users).
What can I do with/for a thousand or so Chinese users? How many will ever pay? Trying to see this as opportunity, but it's an unexpected situation.
So the old user also getting limit for 2 pods?
Yes, but you can add a payment method to increase that to 10. Or at least, it did such for me.
@m4nu said:
What can I do with/for a thousand or so Chinese users? How many will ever pay? Trying to see this as opportunity, but it's an unexpected situation.
Ha! You only think you have thousand of users - in reality it's like 10 guys and thousands of theirs multiply accounts.
Comments
To expand upon this a bit ... first off I am not a dev and therefore badly screw up the terminology, so PLEASE forgive if I use the incorrect terms. My goal is to convey the idea.
I agree completely, it would be best to allow adding one's own email service. That said ...
most (all?) php apps will default to the normal php / server method of sending, without using SMTP settings within the app itself. This seems to be the case with bookstack as it is trying to connect to localhost:10025 to send emails. Maybe it is possible to have a setting for each pod where you can connect a SMTP account for the pod to send emails with? Does that make sense?
Recommended providers: BuyVM - MXroute - LunaNode - Forpsi - IntoVPS
Contact me for all of your Mail-in-a-Box email hosting needs at AnyDomain. I am also a proud reseller of MXroute email.
In my scenario, 100% of my client base is in Australia meaning EU & US aren't really an option for me.
BYOVM allows the user to connect a VPS of their choice in the desired location without PikaPods opening another DC (Win-win in my eyes) Elast.io does this really well, simply by copying a command that adds a public key into their Managed platform
Just an idea
Just ordered the first server in HK. 🤗 Should be ready in a few days.
BYOVM would mean to run custom Docker images in this case? This feature was much-requested in our survey, but I'll skip it for now because it would mean a totally different target market (people who can build and know what Docker images are). Currently the focus is on normal folks, who want to run FOSS apps in a simple way to escape from the usual data harvesting companies. The former market could be served in the future with a different brand.
Simple and secure Borg Backup hosting from $2/month: BorgBase.com
We don't have many PHP apps and if so, we use the projects Docker image. So can't mess with PHP settings. While we could somehow resell email traffice, I don't think that's a good market to get into. Many others already do a good job at that. Like Mailgun, SES, etc.
Simple and secure Borg Backup hosting from $2/month: BorgBase.com
I think what he meant was to bring his own server like what runcloud/serverpilot does.
If so, that would be outside of PikaPods's goals, right?
Ah, got it. No, that’s not a goal. There are already solutions for that. Like Portainer.
Simple and secure Borg Backup hosting from $2/month: BorgBase.com
Uhmm, I think that you missed the point ... how am I to even use Mailgun, SES, etc. since that is what your answer refers to? I am not suggesting you 'resell email traffic' but rather have some mechanism for each app to send it's outbound emails. Which, right now, they do not. At least the apps I am using do not. One doesn't need it, but the other certainly does.
Recommended providers: BuyVM - MXroute - LunaNode - Forpsi - IntoVPS
Contact me for all of your Mail-in-a-Box email hosting needs at AnyDomain. I am also a proud reseller of MXroute email.
I don't think there is any modern, sane PHP application not supporting external SMTPs these days.
BookStacks: Enable SFTP access, edit
.envfile for BookStacks, change SMTP settings there, restart pod, done - it's using external SMTP now.Sure, (global - per pod) localhost or
mail()/sendmailwould be more convenience, but then you would need to resell SES/Mailgun/Sendgrid or something and make sure you follow all theirs guidelines, have some log, expose it somewhere, let user configure domain (because we want domains!), make sure user has appropriate DNS entries ( SPF, etc). Then probably vendor lock it to two services or something (you don't want to implement 81758178578) - and people gonna be mad "WHY THERE IS NO SENDGRID!!!!1111". Seems like shit ton of work for almost zero profit... while most apps handle that internally and you just go to settings / .env and edit it there.@m4nu
Is there a chance that app view would show timestamp (or relative time?) next to
Started? I clicked restart, it was so fast that I've never noticed that it worked - visual confirmation likeStarted (10 seconds ago)would be pretty nice.Negative, more like Cloudron or Elast.io
Understand the potential problem. Many apps already allow you to add SMTP details. E.g. Listmonk, a Mailchimp alternative has it in the UI. Bookstack has it in the .env file (which we populate during container creation). For Nextcloud the config.php with SMTP details is also available via SFTP.
It wouldn’t be impossible to populate these settings during setup and start off with email working. Just a bit fragile and some work to set up. Limiting this to a few dozen emails from specific IPs and using a shared domain should be possible too.
So you are probably right and this will be needed eventually. I’ll put it in the “planned” category for now and look into it in a few weeks after the transition from our beta is all done.
Simple and secure Borg Backup hosting from $2/month: BorgBase.com
Good idea! I can get this data via the existing stats. Can also be useful to debug unstable containers.
Simple and secure Borg Backup hosting from $2/month: BorgBase.com
Thanks for pointing me in the right direction! @Jab
Recommended providers: BuyVM - MXroute - LunaNode - Forpsi - IntoVPS
Contact me for all of your Mail-in-a-Box email hosting needs at AnyDomain. I am also a proud reseller of MXroute email.
Could you expose the
.envor equivalent in the UI? Lots of custom work, though.For now I'm trying to keep all settings in env vars. For some apps you can pass settings with them and it's the best way for containers. In most cases the container will set up a config file based on env vars internally (which is lost when recreating the container).
If an important setting for an image isn't available as env var, I'd file it as enhancement with the image maintainer.
Simple and secure Borg Backup hosting from $2/month: BorgBase.com
Yea, but the point is the same, to bring your own server, which is not the goal as @m4nu said.
Better you use solutions that you said instead.
It was just a suggestion - Avoids the need (and cost) of opening multiple DC's
Few new apps added today:
Simple and secure Borg Backup hosting from $2/month: BorgBase.com
I have tried it, they are ready-to-go within about 20 seconds. Love the environment variables settings on the apps before even starting them. With the automatic subdomain creation, I find it a pretty good alternative to the shared hosting auto-installers. One feature I would request is more questions for long-running apps like "Do you really want to pause/delete? This Pod has been running for x days."
The ability to pause is awesome. And it is solved in a very convenient and intuitive way. I wish VPS providers had a feature like this.
@m4nu I just hope you can actually maintain the updates for all the docker images, because those seem to be the weakest link on many open source projects.
I think it is worth considering an additional environment variable for "private pod" which would set up a server with http auth in front of any web based Pod.
Does the Jupyter pod contain Jupyter Notebook or JupyterLab?
There is already double confirmation for deleting a pod. Thinking of changing this from the slider to typing the name, as most other sites do. Stopping is pretty harmless, so no confirmation for now. Maybe I'm also misunderstanding the suggestion.
Not a fan of basic auth, but there could be uses. You'd still end up with a double login.
Should be Jupyter Lab. It's running the scipy image
For now I only use published upstream images. So the main effort is to run a few quick tests and see if the images still works in general and with our setup specifically. May hire part time help to support this part.
Also, some more apps added:
wp-contentvia SFTP.And finally, Rocket.Chat got an update after the project cleaned up their image a bit. Previously their start command was a weird bash loop. They moved this into the app now and I hope it's more stable with that.
Simple and secure Borg Backup hosting from $2/month: BorgBase.com
If Basic Auth is what I think it is then the 2 ways I would have used it thus far are:
Make an ArchiveBox index private. I was too dumb to figure out the config file and not determined enough to dig deeper.
As a temporary measure when creating a new pod that does not request admin credentials in the environment variables. I recognize that the chances of someone just guessing the pod URL and creating/updating the admin account before I get to it are basically zero, but sometimes I get a little paranoid, especially if I get interrupted.
I'll admit these aren't the best use cases. #1 is literally "I'm too dumb to do it the right way" while I would only use #2 for like 10 minutes per pod.
Just discovered pikapods while browsing some self-hosted threads, signed up but showing $20 in credit instead of 50, is the beta policy changed now?
BTW is it possible to add Outline? https://www.getoutline.com/
Yeah, I reduce it to $20 a few weeks ago after the first test server got full. Still generous. Can't update the title here, so sorry for the confusion. Just found out that I can edit the title. The beta will probably finish next week when the US and Asia regions go online. So you were just on time.
Already working on Outline, but it has many dependencies. Doing simpler apps first.
Simple and secure Borg Backup hosting from $2/month: BorgBase.com
Had to close the beta early after someone posted about it on a Chinese forum. 🙈
So it's $5 free starting credit and max 2 pods for free users now. And you can't use a disposable email or proxy to sign up (happened a LOT for those users).
What can I do with/for a thousand or so Chinese users? How many will ever pay? Trying to see this as opportunity, but it's an unexpected situation.
Simple and secure Borg Backup hosting from $2/month: BorgBase.com
Overall, great project.
This is why we cant have nice things.
So the old user also getting limit for 2 pods?
Yes, but you can add a payment method to increase that to 10. Or at least, it did such for me.
Ha! You only think you have thousand of users - in reality it's like 10 guys and thousands of theirs multiply accounts.
Correct. Just add a payment method to show you are a real person. No actual payment needed.
Will add a third EU server today and US should go online any day now. Just missing its data drives.
Simple and secure Borg Backup hosting from $2/month: BorgBase.com
I’m ready 🙂