Cloudron

Cloudron is a powerful free-as-in-freedom cloud platform that allows you to self-host webapps efficiently while providing unified user accounts, various automated sysadmin services, tested update pathways for dozens of mature free software apps in the Cloudron appstore and a RESTful API.

At the FKI, together with a range of actors in Barcelona we are currently testing the Cloudron.

Installation instructions

Cloudron's reference documentation contains installation instructions.

We start with a clean Ubuntu machine provided by our community datacentre partner La Mar De Bits.

We point the main domain name A record with a wildcard (*) to the IP of the server. Some ISPs (like Digital Ocean and AWS/Route 53) provide an API to their DNS servers to which the Cloudron makes calls to manage the domain name. In this case we have a domain at https://dinahosting.com/, which seems to have an API for their DNS. We could check with the Cloudron team to see if they can add support for this ISP.

We download and run the installation script with: $ wget https://cloudron.io/cloudron-setup $ chmod +x cloudron-setup $ sudo ./cloudron-setup --provider generic

And after a while (15-30") we browse to the IP address of the server where we accept the generated and unrecognised SSL certificate. Then we can create an admin user and we are in the my. subdomain where we can configure all the rest.

We want to enable the email server, but when doing so a message appears: "No DNS provider is setup. Displayed DNS records will have to be setup manually." Logically so, as we had only pointed a wildcard A record to the server. So we manually add DNS records at our domain dame service provider for the MX, TXT records as detailed in the Email setup section under settings (check the "advanced" link underneath each record in settings). Only I'm not sure how to deal with the PTR .in-addr.arpa address: where can one register such reverse address lookup?

Installing apps

Cloudron has an apps store that runs by default at cloudron.io and provides dozens of mature free software apps ported to the Cloudron platform.

Rocket.chat

We click the Rocket.chat button in the store and it asks us under what subdomain we want to install it and what users will be able to use it (we choose: all). Then there is a warning: "The first user to login becomes the Rocket.Chat administrator This administrator can mark other users as administators."