Self-hosted alternatives to popular cloud services | Hacker News Reader

Self-hosted alternatives to popular cloud services

liminality.xyz

379 pointsdnantes142 comments

"N self-hosted alternatives to popular cloud services" is becoming a meme.

Here's 43 self-hosted alternatives to popular cloud services, with one-click demos you can try yourself!

https://apps.sandstorm.io/

Tiny Tiny RSS, Ghost, Gitlab, and Rocket.Chat are in there.

ownCloud is missing, but you can try Davros, which is compatible with the ownCloud client apps. https://apps.sandstorm.io/app/8aspz4sfjnp8u89000mh2v1xrdyx97...

Ampache is missing, but you could try Groove Basin for music -- it's neat in that you can share control of the playback with other people, to implement a communal music player. https://apps.sandstorm.io/app/wfg1r0qra2ewyvns05r0rddqttt57q...

(But also someone should package ownCloud and Ampache for Sandstorm! https://docs.sandstorm.io)

If someone wants to push forward porting ownCloud to Sandstorm, check out this existing issue about it: https://github.com/sandstorm-io/sandstorm/issues/89

For any help regarding ownCloud internals, everyone is very welcome in our IRC channel #owncloud-dev (on freenode).

Working on the other mentioned project, I've laid some of the groundwork in the last few months (Sandstorm now supports WebDAV, and the OwnCloud sync clients modified to connect) so it's certainly worth picking back up.

That's because MSaaS is fast becoming a new way to ship software. ISVs are taking a serious look at it to improve customer satisfaction and security concerns.

Sandstorm!

I would also love to see two other things for Sandstorm, though they might not be a good fit:

- A web IDE

- A container to run web stuff I'm working on (ie hook it up to the ide through rsync or something)

The problem with sandstorm is the dependence on third-party auth. Until sandstorm has internal user stores, it's not a viable self-hosting solution.

You can log in to Sandstorm using any email address.

Eventually, we plan to support logging in using a PGP key.

We see "internal user stores" (e.g. basic username/password with no connected email address) as problematic because a major design goal of Sandstorm is the ability to move data between hosts easily. Say you and five friends have been using Rocket.Chat on Sandstorm Oasis, and then you decide to transfer it to a self-hosted Sandstorm server -- or vice versa. It would be nice if after moving, Rocket.Chat can still recognize your five friends and being the same people, so that you don't lose your PM history and such. This is only possible by using some form of federated identities which all Sandstorm servers can independently authenticate. Username/password is inherently per-server so doesn't provide that.

It's not a bad option, and you make a decent case for that. However, the entire point of self-hosting for me is to be entirely self-reliant. Why would I use a github account to login to a Sandstorm Gitlab instance?

Well, it's entirely up to you what login mechanism you want to use, so if Github isn't what you want, then by all means don't use it. You can be completely self-reliant using email login, or eventually PGP login. But some people find Google and Github login convenient.

FWIW we're currently working on a change that will allow you to attach multiple such "identities" to a single account, after which we plan to open up the door to a lot more authentication providers, including other "open" federated options like OpenID or Shibboleth (as well as popular proprietary services like Twitter, Facebook, etc. -- again, it's up to each user to decide what's most convenient for them).

Probably at some point you'll be able to host your own IDP as a Sandstorm app, if that's what you want. Other Sandstorm servers would be able to rely on that IDP as well, so it meets the federated requirement.

Have you thought about adding Persona auth?

This seems like something we'd be interested in.

Of course, we have a lot on our plate, so I can't guarantee anything. Happy to accept pull requests. :)

My first RSS reader was self-hosted. When I went away on vacation and came back to learn that my computer had shut down during that time, I switched to Google Reader.

Curious. I had the opposite experience. Went away on vacation and came back to learn Google Reader had shut down.

LOL, sorry. Brilliant.

Must have been a pretty long vacation. ;)

The other replies are far more hilarious but you should consider a VPS for this reason rather than a computer at home or similar. They are extremely affordable and can be restarted/restored from backup remotely easier.

... except that it doesn't have basic stuff like email. For that I use Mail-in-a-Box [0], but I would love to see both projects merging.

[0] https://mailinabox.email/

Sandstorm does have an email app (roundcube), though admittedly it's a little weird to use right now. We plan to make Sandstorm work better as an email server in the future, probably early 2016-ish.

I am talking about an email server, not an email client.

Although this is a nice write up about a possible setup for self hosted alternatives for popular cloud services, I don't like it. It falls short to compare the different possible services and the possibilities you can have with them. OwnCloud is nice, but why should I pick on OwnCloud and not SeaFile. Ampache is cool, but why not Subsonic?

I would like to read the reasoning behind the individual choices OR the reasoning behind the overall choice of moving a way from big corp products.

It feels to much like a "look at my setup" posts, which are nice to read but it could be much better.

But, my input now:

OwnCloud is wonderful for file syncing but where it really shines is the contact and calendar sync. It is the easiest to install and best accessable web interface Cal/CardDAV software out there. Radicale is a wonderfull little python Cal/CardDAV server but it hasn't got a web interface which is a feature I do miss when I don't have it. OwnCloud is really pulling through on the whole "google replacement", work has been started on a mail client which looks very nice and works decently (for now).

Ampache is cool but I found the installation to be too fiddly and easy to break. It could be my incompetence with that product but I prefer subsonic. A java product which just runs and it runs well. The webinterface desperately needs a good UIoverall but it works and it doesn't get in the way.

RocketChat I don't know and I should look into but I do feel that XMPP should be the chat replacement for all. The fedearation, the gazillion clients and the maturity of the software is just so so nice that I am sad that it isn't more popular. I feel it's a huge shame google and facebook stopped fedarating their xmpp services.

I've installed and abandoned ownCloud several times, mostly because it is far too heavy for what I need and I had concerns about its security. I also had to set up EncFS on my local machines for client-side encryption of sensitive files because there was no way I was trusting that to ownCloud server-side.

It took more work to set up but I have Seafile self-hosted on the smallest DigitalOcean VPS and it works beautifully. $5/month, plenty of space for the amount of files I need to sync across machines, and my data is in Germany which is great (I'm in Europe). Native client-side encryption is built-in to the client so I have an easier configuration on local machines, and it does most of what I need.

I'm still looking for a good self-hosted CalDAV/CardDAV option that doesn't require PHP or MySQL, but as this data is less sensitive I'm happy to trust it to FastMail for now.

> I also had to set up EncFS on my local machines for client-side encryption of sensitive files because there was no way I was trusting that to ownCloud server-side.

Did you host OwnCloud yourself? But you didn't trust the software with your files? In what way is the SeaFile solution you are running now more trustworthy?

> I'm still looking for a good self-hosted CalDAV/CardDAV option that doesn't require PHP or MySQL, but as this data is less sensitive I'm happy to trust it to FastMail for now.

http://radicale.org/ is exactly what you are looking for.

> Did you host OwnCloud yourself?

Yes, I prefer to self-host anything I can. I'm lucky to have a gigabit FTTH connection and moving lots of data around is no problem. I still prefer to use a remote VPS because some things are best left to the pros.

> But you didn't trust the software with your files? In what way is the SeaFile solution you are running now more trustworthy?

Seafile has a much smaller attack surface (no PHP, MySQL not required, etc) and handles the client-side encryption itself. We are discussing degrees of trust here, so while I was happy to trust ownCloud and the VPS to be there for a request, and to not corrupt my data, I didn't trust that my sensitive data was safe if the server was compromised. EncFS was a workaround, but it cluttered up Nautilus with extra drives since every encrypted directory had to be mounted as a drive. Now I'm comfortable trusting Seafile to do all that because an attacker would need to compromise both my VPS and my local machine to gain access to sensitive data. This is orders of magnitude less likely and for me is an acceptable risk, especially considering the simpler software stack.

And I'm definitely checking out radicale, thanks for the tip. If it does contact photo sync (annoyingly not currently supported my FastMail CardDAV) I'll give it a try.

When I was reviewing alternatives, syncany's web page claimed that seafile has a poor security record: https://github.com/syncany/syncany/wiki/Comparison:-Syncany-...

I'm not sure how seriously to take this.

I nearly went with Syncany, they were a very close second but they are still in alpha, plus they have no mobile apps (yet). I really like being able to take a photo with my phone and have it sync to my computer.

Development on Seafile is very active and they are transparent about security issues. I don't think it is poorly written but maybe a third-party audit like Truecrypt did is a good idea.

Here's their 'Records of security issues' page: https://seacloud.cc/group/3/wiki/security-records/

> Here's their 'Records of security issues' page: https://seacloud.cc/group/3/wiki/security-records/

Just take a look who reported their recent issue allowing a lot of attack vectors. (more than they mentioned though) :)

Actually if somebody had a local user account themselves they could bruteforce the secret key in seconds. And SeaFile has additionally modified the default Django components making it more insecure: https://github.com/haiwen/seahub/commit/7cdb70368aa7acbf0546...

By the way, ownCloud does run a Bug Bounty: https://hackerone.com/owncloud

On mobile so please excuse me if I missed something subtle, but what's more insecure about this change? From what I know constant time compare protects against timing side channel attacks, so isn't it improving security here?

That was actually the part where they partially mitigated the vulnerability with. So before it was more insecure. The green one is the "fix" :)

The constant time comparison is pretty irrelevant here. Check https://github.com/haiwen/seahub/commit/7cdb70368aa7acbf0546..., basically a valid password reset token in default Django requires an attacker to know:

- Primary Key of the user (User ID)

- Hashed version of the user password

- Timestamp of the last login (1 second accuracy)

- Number of days since 2001-1-1 converted to base 36

- The configured SECRET_KEY

Basically except the configured SECRET_KEY and the hashed version of the password everything is known to an attacker. And even if an attacker knows the SECRET_KEY they would not be able to generate a valid token as the old password hash is required.

However, Seafile has removed the hashed password out of their version of "tokens.py". This means that if somebody knows the SECRET_KEY they could create valid password reset tokens. That the initial SECRET_KEY was basically generated by `str(random.randint(0,100000))` did make this all much more worse… (https://github.com/haiwen/seahub/blob/b6f8935c0f355cc70145f9...)

Bad thing about this is that this basically makes a lot of old Seafile instances insecure unless they get a new SECRET_KEY. They did somewhat tell users to regenerate it within a forum post and some wiki page (https://seacloud.cc/group/3/wiki/whats-new-in-the-next-versi...) but that's not really a good way to spread awareness…

Thanks for taking the time to explain... Sorry to nitpick, but I'm trying to get things clear.

your original comment pointing to the commit said

> And SeaFile has additionally modified the default Django components making it more insecure

So I was under the impression that this commit was making things worse, not better. Thanks for clarifying that this was already fixed in this commit, rather than introduce a vulnerability. It looks like they added the hashed password on the diff to mitigate this issue - unless I am missing something here? Can you explain why they "partially mitigated the vulnerability" here? is there still some gap that they've missed?

I'm not underestimating the vulnerability, or the fact that it was there in the first place. Just trying to get a full(er) picture.

I've had a read through this, and some other places where insecurity of Seafile is exposed/discussed/fixed. I agree that the overall impression I'm getting is that they're not security experts, and security could have definitely been better designed or taken into account in the first place.

I still think they're trying to do their best, and fix problems and improve. I hope for their and their users' sake that they can get some security-dedicated contributors (mostly to prevent bad things in the first place rather than fixing them later on). There's always more that can be done, but I'd like to give them the benefit of the doubt here and have faith that things will be better in the long run. Having a (robustly) secure, open-source dropbox replacement is a good thing. I think that's their aim, even if they are some times misguided.

disclaimed: I'm not even a user of Seafile, let alone know much about its codebase. It's the first time I hear about it. I was just curious about the security aspects of their product in light of some criticism here and on github etc.

> Seafile has a much smaller attack surface (no PHP, MySQL not required, etc)

ownCloud does run a successful Bug Bounty program and is paying for security bugs: https://hackerone.com/owncloud

Also I have published a blog post elaborating why CVEs are not everything when it comes to comparing the security of products: https://statuscode.ch/2015/09/ownCloud-security-development-...

Furthermore please take a look at https://seacloud.cc/group/3/wiki/security-records/. Not using PHP doesn't make everything more secure magically, neither does using PHP make things more secure.

Thanks, good to know.

The ownCloud Android client required duplicate copies of all the photos & videos (the original plus a copy in the ownCloud folder) which filled up storage on my phone too quickly. Once this is sorted I might try it again, even if only for the calendar and contacts. It has many features but I just don't need most of them.

There is a pull request with a fix for the Android issue you describe: https://github.com/owncloud/android/pull/1168 Would be very helpful if you can test it! :)

Thanks for radicale! I switched to it from Google Calendar and Contacts. The git integration is amazing.

How do you update Seafile? I've found the manual update process to be somewhat unwieldy. (I'm spoiled by package managers)

You update manually via SSH. It's a bit more tedious than a package manager but not too bad. It took me a while to wrap my head around their file layout and how they do things, but I have it figured out now and updating takes a couple minutes. I can have two SSH terminals open on the same machine and by the time the first one completes `apt-get update && apt-get -y upgrade` I'm nearly done with the Seafile update. I really don't like adding third-party PPAs so I'll probably stick with this method for a while even if someone manages to package it up.

I run ownCloud, despite some reservations about its security. I'm not too concerned about the data in ownCloud itself (if it's private, then I encrypt it client-side, but most things I put in ownCloud are not very private). I'm more concerned about it being used as a launching point for an attack on my home server. As a kind of compromise, I'm running it in a VM.

> I run ownCloud, despite some reservations about its security. I'm not too concerned about the data in ownCloud itself (if it's private, then I encrypt it client-side, but most things I put in ownCloud are not very private). I'm more concerned about it being used as a launching point for an attack on my home server. As a kind of compromise, I'm running it in a VM.

ownCloud does run a bug bounty program (https://hackerone.com/owncloud) and the company supporting the project also employs internal security experts.

You might also want to read https://statuscode.ch/2015/09/ownCloud-security-development-... which covers why comparing CVEs is not a reliably way to compare the security of products.

> I'm still looking for a good self-hosted CalDAV/CardDAV option that doesn't require PHP or MySQL

Baikal is PHP, but can run on sqlite instead of MySQL : http://baikal-server.com/

I feel the same way about owncloud and most of the currently available webdav/filesync self-hosted options.

My compromise for the most part is having all of those services walled off behind vpn.

> RocketChat I don't know and I should look into but I do feel that XMPP should be the chat replacement for all

Agreed. Given that there are multiple, open source servers, several good open source Web clients and literally hundreds of native libraries/clients, XMPP seems like the obvious choice here.

What irks me even more - Rocket Chats homepage: > Native client applications available for download on Linux, Windows and OSX.

Rocket Chat's GitHub Repo for the "Native" desktop Apps: https://github.com/RocketChat/Rocket.Chat.Electron

Call it a desktop app, sure. I won't use it, but I won't begrudge you the term desktop app. If you're bundling NodeJS and using a webview, your app isn't native.

I don't get this. Why does the language it's written in make it "not native"?

Firefox is pretty "native", yet practically all of the UI is powered by JS.

Hell some of the built in programs in windows 10 are using html/js/css and if you are going to argue that the built-in "part of the OS" programs aren't native, then what is?

If you can see performance issues or problems with how it works then point those out, don't just blanket knock an entire application because you don't like the languages it uses.

Well, that's just the issue. I have no problem with Electron apps as an idea, but they're often coupled with extremely slow rendering. You can tell immediately.

For instance, in Slack, which is more or less an Electron app / browser in a box, I can easily get it down to <5 fps just by posting a snippet or going too far in scrollback. Resizing the window is beyond painful, etc., etc. It all seems unbelievably unnecessary - why should a chat program, literally text on a screen, perform like this on a top-of-the-line quad-core i7 system?

Having a problem with the performance is perfect criticism, but the commenter i was replying to was bashing it because of it's choice, not because of it's performance. He won't even try it before saying that.

web rendering doesn't automatically make an app slow. And in my experience choosing a "common" platform like the web allows an app to run everywhere. I'm not suddenly going to be able to triple my development speed, so without the common platform that means that i'd only be able to support one major platform, or all platforms but with a small fraction of the development speed, and most likely many more bugs.

And to be fair, saying slack is nothing more than "text on a screen" is really oversimplifying it. There are tons of formatting options, code highlighting, embedded HTML, embedded video and images, attachments, coloring, emojis, and more.

It seems like a pretty obvious choice to go with a web rendering engine seeing as it supports almost all of that "natively".

Performance, usability, conformance to platform standards, you name it, packaged web views are terrible for it.

Electron apps package a web view and show it on a desktop. They're explicitly using a browser window without the browser chrome.

Firefox honestly is a terrible choice to defend non-native UI conventions. You might as well have picked Java apps as your argument.

Fully based on XMPP there's also Movim which bring social network features on top of it https://movim.eu/ . P.S.: I'm the author of the project.

So how does it relate to XMPP? Is Movim a XMPP server like ejabberd? Or is it something else?

It looks like it uses xmpp more like the way Google wave did than regular im but I can't tell for sure, I signed up but wasn't able to login with a browser and they only have Linux-ish native apps.

ownCloud designer here – thanks a lot for the kind words! We’re also about to improve the web interfaces for Calendar and Contacts in coming ownCloud versions.

Also, I’m glad you like the Mail app although it’s in a very early stage! If you experience any issues or have feature requests, please let us know at https://github.com/owncloud/mail/issues :)

I have a question about owncloud if you don't mind: Is there any way to run owncloud modularly? For example: I'd like just the calendar setup. I don't want to sync files, or share pictures with it, etc.

Is there any way I can set up just the features I want, and disable the rest? I have very briefly looked over how to do this, but haven't found anything.

You can enable and disable pretty much everything – except Files. That’s because it’s the core app and others like Gallery, PDF viewing, Music etc of course rely on there being files. There have been requests to even make it possible to disable the Files app, but we don’t really see that as priority and rather focus on keeping ownCloud rock stable and secure while still driving features forward. We are a very small team and an open source project, so I guess that’s understandable. :)

As a really dirty hack, meanwhile you could just hide the Files icon from the menu via CSS. But, well … ;)

My 2 cents re Ampache - it's pretty cool but doesn't play all media types, where as Kodi (XBMC) plays more media types and has a couple of great Android clients (that play locally).. I did get localplay up and running on Ampache but it's less flexible than Kodi Android clients.

Another subsonic user here...for a very long time as well. You'd have to have a very good product to get me to switch.

I donated years ago to the project and I'm grandfathered into the 'premium' app.

> Ampache is cool but I found the installation to be too fiddly and easy to break. It could be my incompetence with that product but I prefer subsonic. A java product which just runs and it runs well. The webinterface desperately needs a good UIoverall but it works and it doesn't get in the way.

I use ampache, but you are absolutely correct: it is fiddly, and breaks easy. Subsonic also does "just work". I personally like ampache because it's much less resource-intensive on my webserver, and easier to fiddle with (I'm also a java-hater), but Subsonic is much more approachable.

What doesn't work well with XMPP is history on all my devices. I want to use it on my work computer, then when it's time to go I'd like to change to my phone on the way to the train station, then on the train I'd like to keep on chatting on my laptop and when I'm home I'd like to end the discussion on my iMac. I still want to be able to scroll up and to read what I or anyone else in that chat room said before. This seems to be a feature where XAMPP and IRC fail me.

Reddit has a whole community collecting this stuff: https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/

If you haven't already, you should check out Sandstorm https://sandstorm.io/ which allows you to self-host these services sandboxed.

Now, imagine if they would say something (anything!) about pricing without forcing me to make an account.

Sorry, we're working on a website redesign that will fix that.

(Note of course that self-hosting is free...)

If you're interested in self-hosting but are intimidated by the task of installing and configuring everything, make sure to check out Sovereign (https://github.com/sovereign/sovereign), a project that automates the deployment by using Ansible.

some other weapons of choice:

WordPress - https://wordpress.org/ - because "WordPress is the Kalashnikov of the web." (https://t.co/QgsYYUFTbo)

Syncthing - https://syncthing.net/ - for distributed file syncing

Baikal - http://baikal-server.com/ - for contact & calendar syncing

rss2email - https://pypi.python.org/pypi/rss2email - because email is stable, solid, and not going anywhere

Tox - https://tox.chat/ - p2p, encrypted instant messaging w/ video & audio

Syncthing is awesome, I don't understand why some people still use bittorrent sync. If you use ownCloud only for file syncing you'd also be better off using Syncthing instead. The developer is also a super nice guy, answering all bug and performance reports on github.

Regarding contact & calendar syncing, I just wish more apps could just use files instead of always setting a new server and reinventing the wheel to sync data. I still have not found a good way to export my calcurse calendar to my Android phone via files only.

Calendar and Contact syncing should be pretty much standardised (for open source things) around CalDav[1] and CardDav[2]

I'm not quite sure what you'd gain by doing this process manually (export on one device, import on the other) rather than just using a {cal/card}dav server?

1: http://caldav.calconnect.org

2: http://carddav.calconnect.org

Exactly why ownCloud implements CalDAV and CardDAV, the common standard for Calendar and Contact sync. No reinventing the wheel here. Also, exporting your data is as simple as pressing the download button and getting an ics / vcf file.

There are many reasons I prefer Bittorrent Sync over Syncthing: identity based sharing (rather than node linking), good support for situations where you cannot poke holes in a firewall, selective sync support, and encrypted read-only secrets.

Moreover, it's much easier to set up, I share stuff with family and they didn't have problems setting it up.

Note that Syncthing just put out relay support, so you don't have to poke holes in firewall if you don't want to, and your data is still secure, as the relay server just relays the encrypted stream. In the (roughly) week since the feature was released, the public relay network has already routed over 2.6 TiB. (I run 2 relay servers on the public pool)

Relay support is nice, but I still desperately wish for "caching relay servers". I'd love to be able to spin up a high bandwidth VPS with storage and let it be a node, but for it never to have the ability to actually decrypt the data it's storing.

I'm really tempted to switch but do they have an iPhone app? It's quite useful to sync my photos with my desktop using btsync

Both BitTorrent Sync and Syncthing need a particular port in the firewall to be open (or port forwarded). I'm a contractor that's almost always on the client site, and corporate firewalls are not opening up because I'd like it so. I've been using ownCloud for the past year and since it just uses the https/443 port, it works everywhere.

You can test-drive the apps in Bitnami for 1h for free (click demo in browser)

https://bitnami.com/stack/ghost

https://bitnami.com/stack/owncloud

https://bitnami.com/stack/gitlab

https://bitnami.com/stack/tiny-tiny-rss

At GitLab we see that one-click installers are frequently out of date and might not contain our Omnibus packages. The worst example of these are the Bitnami packages that can't be updated at all. We advise to not use one-click installers but instead start an vanilla Ubuntu 14.04 instance and use the recommended Omnibus package installation. This is almost as quick as a one-click install and you're sure of the latest version and easy upgrades. (from https://about.gitlab.com/installation/)

Earlier versions had problems, but it has been a while we fixed it and that is no longer the case. We bundle now PostgreSQL and provide instructions for upgrades :

https://wiki.bitnami.com/Applications/BitNami_GitLab#How_to_...

We are working on verifying the upgrade instructions with the new major version recently released.

Happy to address any concerns or issues we missed

Good to see that upgrading is better. I've adapted our statement https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/commit/9016bfe2... Compared to an installation from source, the Omnibus package is faster to install and upgrade, more reliable to upgrade and maintain. With your installation I think you have to upgrade GitLab, GitLab Shell and the nginx config separately. This is solved if you use the Omnibus package.

Imho it's also worth to mention that bittorrent sync (https://www.getsync.com/) follows a fantastic concept with huge potential.

Unfortunately it's not open source but alone the fact that it can run on a peer to peer basis without the need of any external out of control cloud host is very appealing to me. With small devices such as raspberry pi or NUC becoming more powerful the approach has a bright future.

The peer-to-peer thing is a problem for me. When I use device A, device B is invariably switched off.

You "just" have to rent some cheap server that is always on. That's the self-hosting part for "asynchronous synching". With that, you do not sent your data to a third-party for the delayed syncing, but you host that peer yourself. If you use syncthing, you could make it also save incremental backups and suddenly you got kinda of an online backup.

With BTSync you can even use encrypted read-only secret on the cloud peer, and it will never see any unencrypted data.

As long as BTSync does not betray you.

The idea is discussed for syncthing, https://github.com/syncthing/syncthing/issues/109

There is a 880 USD bounty on it at https://www.bountysource.com/issues/1474343-support-for-file...

If you want a plain music server, then give Mopidy [0] a try. It is also Open Source [1] and written using Python. I have been using it on my Raspberry Pi and it has been fantastic.

[0] - http://www.mopidy.com

[1] - https://github.com/mopidy/mopidy

Does it do gapless playback and does it have cuesheet support? I am missing those with mpd/ncmpcpp.

This sounds a lot like Tomahawk: https://tomahawk-player.org/ – playing from different sources and all. Of course that’s a desktop app, but it’s pretty popular already and well designed.

OwnCloud eats files in the most insidious manner, and this is known to the devs, who in the past have suggested that the workaround is to use another sync application. DO NOT USE OWNCLOUD if you value your data!! We discovered OwnCloud eating files after about three months of office paranoia, beginning to wonder if it was an inside job of a disgruntled employee. Turns out it was an inside job of incompetent software.

Also OwnCloud DOES NOT support "delta sync" (i.e. uploading file chunks when tiny portions of files are changed, instead of, for example, needing to upload the ENTIRE gigabytes-large file when only 10KB have changed). The core devs have kicked the can down the road at every opportunity (for example take a look at the huge BountySource bug for that issue, it's like USD 1200 or something, in addition to the issue being locked to contributors because of all the +1s). This means for any use case involving large files (e.g. TrueCrypt/VeraCrypt volumes), you will quickly find yourself in a messy situation of continually uploading gigabytes of data. It was painful to experience even on a gigabit LAN.

If you really have problems with ownCloud, then please report them at our issue tracker https://github.com/owncloud/core/issues in more detail than »eats files«. Then we can actually fix the problem.

About the delta sync: There’s plans being made and work being done on it. It’s locked because all people get notified on every »+1« comment and that doesn’t help to focus and get actual work done. Besides, do you really believe that USD 1200 will swiftly take care of implementing this feature?

It's sad that if you want a fast Internet around here you are put behind ISP wide NAT which means you can't host anything from home, so all these "self-hosted" things aren't really self-hosted for me.

Consider renting a tiny VPS and use it to tunnel its IPv4 address to your home box. Using tor is another option for some scenarios.

Yeah, but I don't like the idea of having my connection be routed through random VPS providers. I'd have to get a server from a reputable datacenter where only I'd get physical access to the machines.

But routing the connection through your ISP is fine? It sounds like you're making things harder for yourself than strictly necessary.

Setup a VPN or some sort of tunnel that you connect to from your home and proxy TLS across it that terminates on your hardware.

Your VPN provider can probably MITM that much like your ISP could but not without messing with the certificates that you're pinning.

You shouldn't have to do that but given the circumstances it'll work. Whether you can be bothered is another discussion.

Indeed. Although you can still use AWS. But of course, then it is not really "self-hosted" anymore.

I have some (nearly) free AWS instance running irssi for me.

Just because it is behind a NAT doesn't mean you can't run a server. You just need to set the router to forward traffic to the server. Then you need a way to find your public IP address and that is easily done by setting up an account on a public dynamic IP server. I don't do this at the moment but I used to run my own mail server that way (I stopped because it is to hard to find someone to relay my mail now).

I talked long and hard with my ISP when they discontinued my "phone" connection and pushed me faster (jump from 8Mb/s to 100Mb/s) connection via TV cable and only way they can deliver me connection where I can expose ports to the Internet is 3G connection (which works around 3-5Mb/s where I live on a good day)

I'm not ISP locked, but no other ISP offers me anything else since: "we don't offer worse service since we can offer you faster connection via TV cable".

There's no reason why a cable connection can't have a public IP, I certainly did in both of my previous ISPs. Are you sure the other ISPs also have carrier NAT?

All I know is no matter what I do I can't get ports open to the Internet and my ISP plain out told me that it's impossible on their infrastructure

Pagekite might work: https://pagekite.net/

Another Github alternative: http://phabricator.org/, better than GitLab, even.

Self-hosted WebRTC audio/video conferencing: https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet

Phabricator has some really neat features, which of those make it better than our GitLab for you?

Its official installer doesn't contain a 3 web servers, 1 CI server and 1 chat server?

:) Thanks for your response. For other people some context, the GitLab Omnibus packages contains one web server (nginx, but you can also use it with Apache). The CI server is now integrated in GitLab itself (no longer a separate app). And you have the option to run Mattermost (but if you choose not to set this up it will not consume any ram or CPU).

The Omnibus packages allow you to quickly install GitLab without having to do a lot of setup. The installation from source is also official, see https://about.gitlab.com/installation/

Just wanted to +1 the parent comment. I'm sure you're tired of hearing this, but it feels pretty backwards that we have to disable parts of the installation just to get it to work alongside other stuff (with a shared nginx instance, etc).

Its understandable why you wanted to bundle everything, and I bet it makes installation much easier for beginners and/or lazy sysadmins.

That said, it would be even better if the installation worked with existing software instead of installing its own copy of everything. It seems like apt package dependencies would be more elegant than bundling everything together.

Its great to have the installation from source as a supported option. But lets be honest, that's a world of pain that's simply unnecessary for a standard deployment.

- A happy GitLab user

"It seems like apt package dependencies would be more elegant than bundling everything together." totally agree, that why is why we're sponsoring Pirate Praveen who is working on a native Debian package.

That's great! Is there any ETA or discussion I can follow?

The feedback issue is in http://feedback.gitlab.com/forums/176466-general/suggestions... but Pirate Praveen mostly sends updates by email and the GitLab issue tracker. He has it running and seems to be in the final stages.

I learned that the task tracker for this is at https://gitlab.com/debian-ruby/TaskTracker/milestones/1

Since no-one has mentioned it yet, I'll throw in my personal favourite RSS reader: Stringer. Dead easy to set up and does away with all the social stuff that I never used in Google Reader

https://github.com/swanson/stringer

I keep a list of self-hosted application over at https://github.com/victorhaggqvist/selfhosted. Feel free to contribute if you think there is something missing.

Heya, I run a similar site since ages: http://libreprojects.net :)

The focus is on highlighting one (the best) alternative in a given field, and limit the ones listed to those which are well-designed, open source of course, and also have a hosted instance so it’s ready to use for anyone without a server.

I’m sure you already know of https://prism-break.org/ ?

Oddly enough, I have actually not seen any of these. Apparently my Google Fuu was not on top at the time when I started mine.

Anyhow, there is really lots of good stuff that turned up in this entire thread.

Here is another list https://github.com/Kickball/awesome-selfhosted

And another list: https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox/LeavingTheCloud

There are also many cloud-hosted SaaS companies that offer an installable version of their products:

GitHub: https://enterprise.github.com/home

NPM: https://www.npmjs.com/onsite

Travis CI: https://enterprise.travis-ci.com/

Circle CI: https://circleci.com/enterprise

Sysdig: https://sysdig.com/pricing/

CodeClimate: https://codeclimate.com/enterprise

Waffle.io: https://takeout.waffle.io

Coveralls: https://enterprise.coveralls.io/

Sense.io: https://sense.io/enterprise

RollBar: https://rollbar.com/enterprise/

BugSnag: https://bugsnag.com/enterprise

HipChat: https://www.hipchat.com/server

Docker Hub: https://www.docker.com/enterprise/hub/

Upverter: https://upverter.com/enterprise/

CoreOS Registry: https://tectonic.com/quay-enterprise/

Looker: http://www.looker.com/docs/admin/on-premise/installation

RedBooth: https://redbooth.com/en/enterprise/

I am way to lazy for Hosting and maintaining 5 different Services for myself. I have one RaspberryPi running OwnCloud for me and my friends. For the rest I use Syncthing(https://syncthing.net/) where I just sync /home overall devices.

Real question for self hosters: what kinds of applications are you running where you feel you need this?

I use Seafile to synchronize my personal files with those of my wife on several machines. I need it because i don't want to depend on 3rd parties such as Dropbox. Also, I don't know how many Gbs I'd get for free with Dropbox. Probably less that I have with my current setup (1Tb). Not sure if this answers your question, though.

Only speaking for myself...

OwnCloud - I just don't trust an American company to host my data. Now, is my small UK based host as likely to be as effective at protecting my data as DropBox? Maybe not - but they don't have a proponent of torture on their board, so it's swings and roundabouts.

TT-RSS - I couldn't find a decent RSS manager which I liked. TT does the job - and I'm not worried that someone will decide that Google+ is better and force me off.

Ampache - all of my music is stored as FLAC, which can be a PITA to transcode and/or stream. This sits on a box at home and I can listen to my music wherever I am. I'm not reliant on a corporation who might decide that my music isn't licensed correctly, or they don't want to support my hardware, etc.

Personally I use WordPress rather than Ghost - it's more flexible for my needs.

Since you already use ownCloud, you might want to check out the News app: https://apps.owncloud.com/content/show.php/News?content=1680...

It’s pretty cool, basically like TT-RSS but it looks more modern and is integrated in ownCloud. There are also apps for almost all platforms, like apps for Android & iOS which download all articles (and even podcasts) for offline reading.

Oooh! I've been looking for a good PodCatcher. Thanks.

You’re welcome! Let us know of any issues or feedback at https://github.com/owncloud/news/issues :)

Not sure why you're getting downvoted. Surely it isn't bad to say you don't trust American companies. I live here and I don't trust them all.

I don't _need_ to host Owncloud (or any other service) any more than I _need_ Dropbox. It's convenient to have access to files while away, but I could make do with a USB fob if push comes to shove.

The reason I selfhost is this. We are on a rapid path towards home computing devices being nothing more than dumb terminals where some server in the distance hosts your OS, files and apps. All, of course, proprietary so as to make switching painful. I DO NOT WANT THIS. So, I use and root for the technologies that I want to see win. I want complete and unfettered access to my files.

If you are considering self hosting, you must have a look at this excellent self-hosting distribution: https://yunohost.org/

And by the way, ownCloud also has a News reader: https://apps.owncloud.com/content/show.php/News?content=1680... (we’re working on a redesign of the appstore, don’t worry ;)

There’s apps for Android & iOS which download all items for offline reading. The Android app can even download podcasts and videos of Youtube channels.

There’s also apps for OS X, Linux, Firefox OS, Blackberry and Jolla as far as I know.

Most newer NAS Devices (i.e. from Synology) have a wide range of applications to use through webbrowsers or mobile apps.

Sadly, there's no good replacement for Office365 (Word, Excel, Powerpoint).

ownCloud also has a Documents app: https://owncloud.org/blog/owncloud-7-sneak-peek-online-colla...

It works with odt files and you can edit collaboratively, even with people not on ownCloud. Spreadsheets and presentations are not there yet because that’s really difficult. :)

Dokku (http://progrium.viewdocs.io/dokku/) for heroku?

Consider GNU MediaGoblin (http://mediagoblin.org/) as well.

I have to mention that I develop Feedbunch, an open-source RSS reader. It can be self-hosted, needs Ruby on Rails and PostgreSQL.

https://www.feedbunch.com

https://github.com/amatriain/feedbunch

Not open source but still very usefull and self hosted : http://plex.tv

Ampache is cool but is really heavy for a simple hosting. Plex does movies and tv shows sort too. Place a Transmission / Deluge torrent client behind, you have a true media center, on a little server.

Owncloud is cool but very buggy !

I would recommend checking out SyncThing first for anyone curious about ownCloud. They have similarities and differences, I found SyncThing suited my needs more personally but there's some stuff that only ownCloud can do.

There's also BitTorrent Sync which is cool, but sadly proprietary.

A open source alternative to plex would be http://emby.media.

> Owncloud is cool but very buggy !

Sorry that you experienced bugs. Just to ensure that we fix any potential bug: Could you file those as described at https://github.com/owncloud/core/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md? Thanks a lot!

Hey Mooty, nice that you like ownCloud. However, »very buggy« is not very specific. It would be cool if you could open actual issues in our tracker at https://github.com/owncloud/core/issues/ so we can actually fix it.

Thanks! :)

Plex hadn't worked for me when I tried it out of curiosity some years ago. Some devices worked, some had failed to discover it at all. IIRC, the network was fine and it seemed like some issue with their DLNA/SSDP implementation but I haven't bothered to debug proprietary software. Installed MediaTomb and it worked reliably nearly out-of-the-box.

> Owncloud is cool but very buggy

That's not my experience at all. It's been running solid for a year now, on a lowly VPS and two MacBooks. It's got very nice Debian packages and an excellent iOS client.

I think it's rude to just say "very buggy" and leave it at that.

Own cloud is great. I have used it quite a bit. I am using nanobox.io to set my personal cloud. It works really well.

Anybody knows about an alternative for prismic.io? That's basically a CMS for devs, where you inject a site's content through API calls to prismic.io, while they provide a very nice UI for managing the content. It's a great service but I'd like to explore self-hosted alternatives.

I have OwnCloud running on a RaspberryPi. It works fine, and allows me to hook up a 1TB USB drive.

imho Gogs[1] is a much easier to setup/maintain personal git repos. I use it with a 128mb server from RamNode w/ 80gb of space and I'm pretty sure I'll never run out any time soon since I never really commit large files. Plus it's been running smooth for almost 6 months and usually stays around 8-10mb of ram usage.

[1]: https://gogs.io

What do you think about the owncloud music app. Nobody has mentioned it but I'm considering it. Any feedback?

To me this is more SaaS services than "Cloud" but I realize that's audience dependent.

Another choice for distributed file syncing: bittorrent sync. https://getsync.com/

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