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apitman
zenhack
Is! We're not dead yet! (see my other comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36193093).
I don't think app packaging could be said to be the achilles heel -- how much work it involves depends a lot on the app (some things are very easy, others can be painful), but it is certainly not the case that Sandstorm didn't take off because packaging was too hard.
testernews
“Was”, what’s left of sandstorm anymore besides a couple weekender coders whose $dayjob is at cloudflare these days? Doubt CF has anything like 10%/20% time like GOOG.
Sandstorm the business was shut down 6 years ago https://sandstorm.io/news/2017-02-06-sandstorm-returning-to-...
And Sandstorm Oasis the hosting service was shut down almost 4 years ago https://sandstorm.io/news/2019-09-15-shutting-down-oasis
This codebase is basically abandonware at this point and can’t be trusted for anything serious these days. If CF brought this on as an official product (and renamed it), it would go a long ways to build back trust
kentonv
FWIW, the most-active Sandstorm developers over the past couple of years, such as zenhack (to whom you replied) and ocdtrekkie, are not Cloudflare employees, and never were. (They were never Sandstorm employees either.)
For my part, I am indeed mostly focused on Cloudflare Workers today and don't have much leftover energy to spend on Sandstorm. This has nothing to do with Cloudflare telling me how to spend my time. I make my own choices. I still love what we were building with Sandstorm, but what can I say, Workers has been a lot more successful and so I am drawn to focus my energy there.
Note that Cloudflare has no affiliation with Sandstorm, other than employing some of the former team members. Cloudflare did not acquire Sandstorm itself.
drapado
How do you compare to Yunohost? I find the app selection of Yunohost larger and broader
macrolime
Sandstorm is much more secure, that's the main difference.
orblivion
Packaging existing apps tends to be extra work, since you have to retrofit things (like user accounts). But creating brand new apps can actually be less work, because it has things built in (like user accounts).
omginternets
The Go implementation of capnp is alive and well, too. I highly recommend it: https://github.com/capnproto/go-capnp
bullen
Packaging should always just be zip.
Security can just be a OTP: https://github.com/tinspin/rupy/blob/master/src/se/rupy/http...
ocdtrekkie
I think the answer is that packaging apps for Sandstorm is a bad hack, as ripping out the auth system and design granularity is all hard for an existing application. The best Sandstorm apps are written for Sandstorm, and in those cases, the granularity and built-in authentication make it way easier to write an app. I wrote a Sandstorm-native app in less than an hour.
But if you built your entire application assuming you're shipping it via Docker, untangling the sheer amount of redundant garbage you need to pare down to a single-document app that accepts outside authentication and security, ends up being a ton of work to package and then maintain it long-term.
Ideally, I think having apps not made for Sandstorm originally is mostly just a strategy to get enough people operating on Sandstorm's model for people to build Sandstorm-specific apps in earnest.
robertlagrant
I think making apps that have a very clean separation between external security code (e.g. "the claims in the JWT") and internal security code (e.g. "the app's own internal understanding of security, regardless of provider") is always a fantastic idea.
hanniabu
Why not just make it be a docker launcher instead?
kentonv
I wrote a blog post answering that: https://sandstorm.io/news/2014-08-19-why-not-run-docker-apps
Oof... 9 years ago.
ocdtrekkie
Then it would be as poor of a user experience and have as many security problems as one of the literally dozens of self-hosting tools that are just Docker launchers.
closewith
The issue for me with Sandstorm is that it's great until some service/app you need is missing or broken, and then you're back to manual self hosting. I always find that self hosting even one app is the pain, self-hosting more isn't that bad (once you have your box setup).
vmfunction
I have tried for a client who wanted to install open source app in server with sandstorm about 3 or 4 years ago, it is just very slow at the time. Hope they improved that since.
fractalnetworks
Check out fractalnetworks.co if you are looking for something similar that is still under active (commercial) development.
mcint
It's worth mentioning https://YUNoHost.org.
I've done plenty of manual self-hosting. I explored sandstorm for a year or two in the mid 2010s. It worked as promised, but the complexity of integrations, fraying, showed.
I switched to yunohost 6 years ago. I almost entirely don't think about it. I use a few services, wallabag and Uptime Kuma. Tried Nextcloud, HedgeDoc /HackMD/CodiMD, and Monica PRM because it was so painless to give them a go.
My initial motivation for exploring it, came from the hope it could install NextCloud. My attempts at installing OpenCloud and NextCloud, with scripts that would make non-idempotent changes that fail on a second run after first pass fixes, left me sensing an unfriendly forced upsell environment.
I have had to do some manual fixing to complete an upgrade or two, but it has workflows for backups, and some stringent, but fully automated configuration, sanity checking. I don't worry about the complexity.
cycomanic
I tried out Yunohost and I do like it in principle, however what really started to annoy me was that they decided to roll their own sso, and my impression is that it's not very good (there are some threads on the forum criticising it for being quite a mess IIRC). The issue is that because of this it doesn't always play ball with apps which allow for SSO functionality, e.g. the seafile desktop app does not work with yunohosts SSO. I wish they would just switch to an established system like authentik, authelia or keycloak. There were some issues about this in the tracker but I think the suggestions were shut down pretty quickly.
mcint
Dang. That's good to know, thank you.
ocdtrekkie
My understanding is YunoHost makes absolutely no attempt to isolate apps from one another, it just helps you install stuff on a Linux box. Unfortunately that means a single flaw in a single app compromises your entire server.
navanchauhan
Some effort has been put into adding systemd hardening per unit basis.
Every app is run by a special user created to do just that. This app user only has permissions for the app and data folder.
(I don’t have much security/hardening experience)
Gigachad
It’s was designed predocker and is a pretty old school setup. I remember they had issues updating Debian because the new Debian had a new php version which caused issues for some apps.
rapnie
Yes, Yunohost makes installs very easy. But if something isn't working right then you got extra layers to deal with. I don't know how Sandstorm deals with this, but Yunohost taking care of the install and upgrade procedures means that you are bound to the Yunohost integration's version of the software. For instance when installing Discourse via Yunohost this version lags behind significantly. And also Yunohost disables the Discourse upgrade process, while it offers a superior experience.
sunshine-o
I feel like we are always getting into the same trap with those self-hosting platforms. It is the same problem we faced with the Linux Desktop & Mobile. A lot of cool visions, but fragmented efforts, limited app ecosystem & low adoption. We already have Sandstorm, Umbrel, Start9, Yuno, etc. but none of them had the success they deserved.
I'm wondering if taking something like Fedora CoreOS/IoT, Cockpit, linuxserver.io images & develop a nice GUI & documentation on top wouldn't have much greater chance to succeed. People who will try to self host & will most likely stick to it are already familiar with tech & willing to tinker anyway.
prox
Engineers love engineering, they love their own engineering when it comes to open source/free time projects, and they tend to not like the legwork of publishing, polishing and making it ready for public consumption. (Which is a lot of work on its own)
Engineers and QA/useability/marketing people tend not to mingle in these projects. I am broken record at this point, but Blender and Godot tackled this problem.
Take sandstorm, it looks like a informative website but just looking at it I see a ton of friction installing it. Whether or not that is true, but the optics are against it.
kentonv
Sandstorm was actually a startup with product and marketing and we did spend a lot of time trying to make it as simple as possible to install.
The only way to make Sandstorm easier to set up would be to partner with hosting providers to offer one-click installers. In the absence of that, Sandstorm's current install is about as easy as it could possibly be given the constraint of "should run on a generic Linux host".
(Aside: People have always given Linux flak for being hard to install. But have you ever tried to install Windows from scratch? It's sooooo much harder. But no one cares because it's preinstalled on every PC you buy.)
(Aside 2: How did Chrome become the most popular browser? Sure as hell not because it's so easy for people to install. Most people don't know what a browser is. It got there by Google paying a lot of people to bundle it. It's honestly amazing that Google pulled it off, against competitors who owned their respective operating systems.)
Anyway, back in the day, Sandstorm actually offered its own hosting service, which you didn't need to be technical to sign up for. So it was actually quite easy then. But it was a first-party service. In retrospect I think building the first-party service was a mistake. It distracted too much engineering time away from actually building out the platform and ecosystem. It meant we could offer a better price point than a VPS provider would, but I think the people actually interested in the product at that point weren't so price-conscious. If I did it again I'd focus on partnerships.
orblivion
That's a useful bit of feedback. Indeed I would actually say that installation is quite simple as such things go. And maintenance is dead simple, it updates itself in the background.
orblivion
Does this fit your description? https://www.freedombox.org/ This is heavily coupled to Debian.
sunshine-o
Yes in many aspects, and I guess they are leveraging the heavy lifting of Debian package maintenance
PurpleRamen
I would say containers, and especially docker, turned out to be the best solution for this space. We just need some good non-commercial tools for getting the fancy nobrainer app-managment. Everything existing now is ever commecial or still too complicated for the laymen.
c0balt
This looks exciting and definitely something to look out for as an option fkr self-hosting.
Similiar and a little bit more mature is also YunoHost, https://yunohost.org/, or for professional environments, UCS https://www.univention.com/.
fbartels
The one big plus for ucs is their samba server, but it's not the right choice if you are looking for an appstore to install apps from.
My personal favorite is Cloudron, as they have an app concept that only needs minimal human maintenance. And you could even combine it with an LDAP server like ucs for the user management.
asim
When an idea like this strikes but doesn't take off there's definitely an element of "before it's time" but it's also really hard to get people to adopt opinionated development models unless it's part of a bigger language ecosystem or brand which can offer the scale of opportunity like an app store.
There's been attempts to do this without the opinions e.g deploy docker containers but the reality is we do actually need a cohesive vision for the end user for anything like this to take off. Catering to the developers alone in the self hosted model is very hard. And I know Kenton tried hosting too. It's just a tough business all around.
wiml
I used this for a few years at a previous job and really liked it — it didn't get a ton of adoption by other people there, though, unfortunately. It had a bunch of cool ideas and seemed well implemented. I'm sad that it didn't work out as a commercial endeavor.
rapnie
I like how they use capability-based security [0] and use Cap'n Proto protocol. This is another technology that is slow to get broad adoption, but has many things going for when compared to e.g. Protocol Buffers (Cap'n Proto is created by the primary author of Protobuf v2, Kenton Varda).
Timon3
I recently evaluated different protocol libraries for inter-language IPC. The state of Cap'n Proto is sadly quite a bit worse than Protobuf. Many languages either don't have an implementation, or it hasn't been updated for several years.
But it's such a good system, I wish we could use it.
rapnie
Some language implementations are under active development, like C++, Go and Rust. Others not so much. As language support comes, these are major ones. Let's hope they can drive the ecosystem forwards into more popular use.
lrem
Cap'n Proto suffers from trying to improve upon something good enough. It's a real pity, have such a tech without org weight behind it.
ocdtrekkie
I mean, Cloudflare has some org weight. Just not Google monopoly weight.
hgsgm
Do you know who created Sandstorm?
mawise
On the other side of things, I've started using https://www.pikapods.com/ they follow the docker model but are a paid (~$2/mo) hosting provider focusing on open-source self-hostable apps. Seems to me like an easier path for getting non-techies to 'selfhost' their own apps.
ssddanbrown
Pikapods have provided my software for a while. Have not had much feedback from users yet, but no bad feedback is a good sign I guess. The person behind PikaPods was very receptive to my concerns that their website mentioning of "upstream revenue share" could be misleading (didn't apply for my project), and they quickly took action to improve things.
negative_zero
Super cool idea but sadly seems to have been slowly dying over the last few years :( (unless something has changed recently?)
zenhack
The biggest change lately is probably: https://zenhack.net/2023/01/06/introducing-tempest.html
But yeah, Sandstorm has been in a state of "not dead but not moving fast" basically since the company went under; things picked up a bit in 2020, and I got oriented-enough on the codebase during that time to keep it floating along, but, per the post, it's never been easy going.
Anyway, I wish I were answering this question in 6 months time, when I'll be able to show off a variation of Tempest that is relatively usable and can do a few tricks that Sandstorm can't.
yoz
Just spent ten minutes delightedly reading your updates on this. It looks fantastic! I'm really excited to watch what happens next, and wish I had time to contribute.
Are there primary areas in which contributions would be most valuable, especially from those without Golang experience/skills?
zenhack
I suppose that depends on what your skill set is.
At some point the project would greatly benefit from some attention from a UI/UX specialist -- I'm doing my best, but it's not what I'm an expert at. Though right now I'm mostly focused on getting enough stuff to work for it to be of interest, and someone fussing with the UI might just be distracting.
Doing app packaging for Sandstorm might be the most accessible way to help for someone who's not a Go dev -- Tempest will of course benefit from more apps when it's ready to run them, and it'd be a high impact thing for the community right now.
rapnie
Tempest [0] looks very interesting. What is the current state of the project?
ocdtrekkie
Currently Tempest can run a lot of Sandstorm apps. However, a lot of functionality one would expect or need is not implemented yet. It will be a bit before it can replace a Sandstorm server. But it's architecturally different in some fundamental ways which will make implementing new features that Sandstorm never had much easier.
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techempath9
You've told me about something totally new. I want to get involved with sandstorm. Exciting.
tudorw
always interested in self hosted solutions, not tried sandstorm and up for giving it a go, however if I was starting a small fairly simple personal project with no need to scale can I get wheels on it with Tempest, or should I consider building on sandstorm then porting?
ocdtrekkie
All of the dev tools use Sandstorm, and Tempest is not at this point, "complete". But if you were to build something on Sandstorm today, you can be reasonably confident it will work with Tempest.
techempath9
Can you tell me how I can get involved with sandstorm
negative_zero
I've book marked Tempest :) Looks promising. Wish you luck!
srgpqt
This project seems like just the thing to kickstart a new era of decentralization/federation for the social web, an answer to Reddit/Twitter/etc.
arek_nawo
This looks really interesting. Having the ability to self-host various open-source apps is great, though, for me at least, it's always a bit stressful. Without a lot of dev ops experience I'm not always confident in my setup and the upgrade process. Having a tool that simplifies self-hosting would certainly lower the "mental barrier" for more people to do it.
anderspitman
This is, in my opinion, the biggest gap in the market. Selfhosting shouldn't be any more difficult or less secure than running an app on your phone.
arek_nawo
I'm a bit split on this. As an OSS enthusiast I'd certainly like for self-hosting installation and maintenance to be easier. However, from the business perspective, I also see this as just one less reason to use hosted services - which will degrade sustainability of many open source projects.
anderspitman
Not sure I'm understanding you correctly. Can you share an example of what you mean?
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Gigachad
Unfortunately you are probably still better off using commercial hosted services. None of these projects really seemed to have the resources to properly deal with the security you need for an internet hosted service
arek_nawo
After a closer look - I must agree. On the other hand, with more projects implementing bash scripts or using Docker for easier installation, maybe there's a way to make self-hosting easier without such dedicated apps.
Hosted services will always offer more convenience. If the price is fair, they are likely better options in general.
kev_emu
Another twist on self hosted web apps is peergos. Uses a capability based system for access and sharing. End-to-end encrypted and P2P.
App Examples - github.com/peergos/example-apps
API Docs - book.peergos.org/features/apps.html
Disclaimer: I work on the project.
monkeydust
Looks like Caprover https://github.com/caprover/caprover which has been around for a bit, have used in past. Any notable benefits over it?
hgsgm
Fromctheb readme, Caprover is developers developers developers developers.
Sandstorm is for users/admins to deploy many apps together.
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Sandstorm was (is?) way ahead of its time. Fortunately a lot of its ideas live on (a la capnproto). My understanding is the achilles heel is the amount of effort required to integrate and update apps, since each app needs to be rather invasively modified to work with the centralized authorization framework. Also the general difficulty of managing a VPS or port forwarding. But once integrated it's really slick and secure.
The overall UX is very similar to my vision of the future of selfhosting. It should be as easy as installing an app on your phone, then going through a quick OAuth2 flow to set up a tunnel on a domain, and you're up and running.