Cloud in a Bottle: making self-hosting accessible to everyone

These guys have been spamming issues in repos trying to promote this project and no disclosure whatsoever that they are associated with the project.

https://github.com/search?q=%22cloudinabottle.toml%22&type=i...

Surprised to not mention Cloudron in the alternative list. Probably the biggest player in this space

I think the time for this space is here. The appetite to depart from subscriptions and loaning your personal data to ad/ai companies is stronger than ever.

Currently, a lot of this space is docker compose based and simply inaccessible to so many who may otherwise be interested. Whether or not it's this project or another, I hope something gathers enough steam soon to truly break the barriers to entry.

There seems to be a lot of variance between stated and revealed preferences around self-hosting.

It often seems like presenting the image of being autonomous to our peers seems more important than actually achieving it.

It takes a lot of energy to replicate what AWS and friends have done once we factor in concerns like the passage of time and entropy. I've never been able to keep a media/NAS appliance alive for much longer than 3-4 years. Inevitably, there is some kind of catastrophic event and I have to start all over with new vendors, etc. Even without any data loss this gets old. I promise you get tired of this after a while. It might seem like that would never happen and then one day it does.

You can get so much more done if you can actually afford to use the cloud. I have a really hard time believing that many people are genuinely winning on total cost of ownership with self hosting.

"We (Imbue, the company I work for) also offer a managed version, which I think is really important to making this widely accessible - and it gives us a straightforward business model to support the project."

Looking at your hosted page, I see no reference to backups. I see in your docs reference to backup, but you should definitely offer some sort of turnkey, appropriately-marked-up backup solution. Configuration difficulty is what kills self-hosting on the front end, updates make it hard over time, but when it all dies and then I have no backup is when I give up.

I can't find any reference to disk size limits anywhere. Can I host Immich on this? Can I host my media server? What will it cost? Surely not $10/month for my media collection. I'm not a hoarder and mostly have stuff ripped from my personally-owned media, which limits the size, and you're still not hosting that for $10/month. I see you have Jellyfin in the set of apps but I don't know what it will cost. The CPU & RAM limits I understand from the deploy page.

Oh, and I'm specifically referring to your hosted service here.

If your "opt-in platform features" and "interface to allow permissioned access to data and capabilities between different apps" is more expressive/discoverable than eg Cloud Foundry's "Service Broker" approach[0], then I am pretty excited! I run a lot of disparate services which don't interoperate except through explicit workflow automation pipelines (I use ConcourseCI to eg upload images to Immich [1] albums, but others might use n8n[2] for the same purpose).

The "workflow automation" approach is a lot of resource overhead and broker-config maintainance, but my kingdom to be able to arbitrarily compose apps' states, eg commutimemap.com + Craigslist.

0. https://www.cloudfoundry.org/technology/open-service-broker-...

1. https://github.com/gavmor/immich-concourse-resource

2. n8n.io

This is a great project! Yes, the personal cloud is coming and it's going to be for everyone.

I'm working on a project with similar goals but some different design decisions - instead of the typical containers I'm going for thin-client apps that hit a common data layer built on a fully serverless architecture. Not ready for production quite yet, but for those interested: https://starkeep.app/

So many docker app supervisors nowadays.

I'm surprised there's no such thing as a self-hosted deployment spec. An opinionated docker-compose file (or similar) with well defined inputs, outputs, and requirements that works for the average use-case.

This pitch is somewhat interesting, but, much like Sandstorm, browsing the library of pre-built apps kind of leaves me cold. It's too much like browsing a rather tiny mobile app store. There are maybe three apps that I might be interested in.

Since we have AI now, I think exe.dev's pitch is better: they provide Linux VMs, a web proxy, and integrations. You can ask the AI to build whatever web app you like. I'd love to have exe.dev, but running on my Mac Mini.

Your headline is literally the slogan of Magic Cloud. It's been around since 2019, and does this "exact thing" - Basically, "your cloud, on premises" ...

If this can largely automate the backup and update side of things, then it seems like a great middle ground for people like me:

I’m trying to self-host as much of my stuff as possible, but don’t have time to tinker like I used to. Hence updates, backups (etc) fall by the wayside in favour of “set and forget”.

There is a bit more mature project that does the same: https://selfprivacy.org

> 53 is required because instance runs its own authoritative DNS server.

Are you planning to offer alternative solutions for this, e.g. pointing a wildcard A record at the server running the instance? I'd rather not run a publicly accessible DNS server.

I have been working on literally this exact project for the past 6 months, down to the nomenclature used. Running into this on HN is… strange.

I'm trying to understand the difference between this project and FreedomBox. I mean it's great to have options, but have any of them looked over that way? Heck, FreedomBox is even built into Debian now.

Found this and never looked anywhere after: https://github.com/opencloud-eu/opencloud

golang.

Now the key question, can the hardware be made accessible to everyone. Its definitely an improvement to make self hosting software easier but the process of setting even a raspberry pi for an average consumer interested in self hosting is still a barrier. They probably will be able to figure it out via youtube and some reddit posts but there should be an easier process or way

I really like the idea, and I would like to see Tailscale evolve Aperture in this direction. Tailscale is already an easy way for anyone to connect their devices, which is essential for any sort of "personal cloud", and Aperture, while initially something of an AI gateway, is also facilitating connections to other services and apps.

If you're building a personal cloud, you also want your AI connected to it, but probably with some degree of management. Aperture already provides a fair amount in this area, and probably with a connector for Cloud in a Bottle, could give your AI safe access.

Reminds me of my old idea dating back to 2014 (https://linuxdreams.blogspot.com/2015/03/cloud-in-box-applia...). Interestingly the blog is still active.

I did a few pitches related to this at Nasscom Startup warehouse and IITM RTBI. Though this was welcomed by the panel members but it never took off due to lack of capital for such a startup during those times in India. I had to abandon and focus on my day job.

Making self-hosting really accessible isn't that easy, even if it's easy to setup the server machine itself. One needs to make their server machine accessible to everyone, which isn't generally possible due to how networks work, one needs a white IP address and making sure no incoming connections are rejected by the internet provider. Also one needs a domain. Obtaining it requires some bureaucratic burden, costs money and pricing isn't always transparent.

These barriers are high enough, so that common people can't create/host their own sites. Only skilled enthusiasts or professionals can afford having their own site.

App catalog looks good, but they miss Home Assistant which is a major inconvenience

Looks really interesting! I'd like to see immich in the available apps. For me the Auth part is not super important. But has it one-click updates?

Cloudron does something very similar (I'm a user): https://www.cloudron.io/

Interesting project! I've found self hosting a lot more approachable with the advent of AI to help with inevitable errors. I run every new app in its own service account and as a rootless podman quadlet. There are three main difficulties that I come up against with every app. First is backups, or more accurately restoring data. My understanding is that just taking a snapshot doesn't always give you a working restore point because an app could be mid-database migration or something like that. Second is updates, and third is accessibility outside the network. I am slowly working on my own solutions, interested to know how you tackle those though?

> Rent a box from whoever you like, and turn it into your own personal cloud.

Yeah, that’s not what cloud computing is.

> making self-hosting accessible to everyone

This happens with making many small to medium level resource hungary apps, for personal usage, run on one VPS which is not a heady duty machine costing heavy duty money. I have tried this on similar machines 2GB RAM and 1-2 VCPU and after 2-3 apps it starts swaying like a drunkard in slow motion even in that SSH session. But at least this one seems to be better than something like PikaPods, in combo pricing regard (I am not saying one is generally better over the other), where the pricing is rather per app.

>At the core, it's just an Ubuntu machine with a web server that hosts a dashboard and routes HTTP(s) requests to containerized apps.

So no fail over/redundancy? I think at minimum it should be two machines, so one can break. That is one of the important features of cloud applications as far as I'm concerned.

You don't have to deal with the problem of a single computer breaking.

Basically what we were already doing before Cloud took over distributed computing and grid computing as industry terms, Open Stack and a few others.

i dont think i understand the idea of cloud in a bottle - it seems like overthinking to me

I'm confused, isn't a self-hosted cloud something like openstack or kubernetes?

I've been really enjoying exe.dev

Instant spin ups and restarts

Easy interfaces ssh web cli AI agent

Integration aplenty

This is neat! I've been building something very similar for personal use. I may lift a little bit of the app manifest part.

I'm a little surprised that there's just one backup app, instead of each app coming with its own backup sidecar. To backup Immich, for instance, requires coordinating between its four different programs. I guess I'll read more about how that backup app works too ha

> nextcloud: slow and unreliable, and more enterprise-targeted now

bewcloud could be a lean alternative for home users if that's something you'd like to offer.

In case someone is asking: THIS is what a launch article should be like. 10/10.

We need gmail, docs and sheets replacements. With AI, maybe people can develop solid alternatives very quickly. And Linux phones.

Trillion dollar companies try to extract more and more from us, the only response is for us to develop alternative solutions and continuously chip away at their strengths- what made them monopolies in the first place.

One thing that I found LLMs useful for is devops.

I had rather good experience using agents to setup and deploy own cloud, Jellyfin and co. I experimented also getting a VPS, just giving the LLM the ssh keys and having at it. It’s pretty good.

If the AI stays afloat, then I think the future lies somewhere there. Not too sure about the security side of the things …

Running the authoritative dns for the zone seems elegant, although wouldn’t that imply you absolutely can’t use cloudflare or similar services to avoid ddos/bots?

Proxmox + community-scripts.org is pretty great.

A bit narrow definition of a "cloud", no..? More like a microservice server on rails

Bits missing from cloud being global CDN (selfhosted), routing, regional sharding, etc.

I think what this needs to be truly accessible by general public is a mobile app (most people don’t have computers) and to be able to deploy it (including setting up domains) from there. Payments would definitely be a problem because of the various app stores’ rules.

I recently bought a motherboard for my first self made pc. Six to eight sata slots is already enormous and the fact that you pay once and use your hardware freely opened my eyes. I was paying a subscription for cloud 1 tb for a trivial service. I am now hoarding my torrents worry free and plan to convert it to NAS. However i do still use my onedrive plan shared with three friends for 10 dollars for sharing large files till i set up my own nas with a good permanent net connection. The other issue is that I’m renting currently and if I’m changing countries I’ll have to rely on the onedrive again

Great project! I have had conversations along these lines with my colleagues for quite some time now. Will definitely try.

The docs mention cloudinabottle.toml but the app repos all have openhost.toml. Did you folks change the name of the platform?

Also, can you point to how the unified auth works? Couldn't find anything in the manifest spec.

An aside: Fantastico was such a wonderful piece of software for me to learn and toy and tinker with web stuff. I was so impressed by the simplicity of it. (I phased out of the shared scene a almost two decades ago; I guess everyone moved to Softaculous, https://softaculous.com/fantastico/)

accessible self hosting is already here, its called 'claude' or 'codex' you basically start it and tell it what you need, dont even have to know any software names.

How is this different from say Docker? I procrastinated getting acquainted with the latter for a long time because I thought it was more for industrial-scale infrastructure, but when I finally wound up using it I was surprised at how easy and low-maintenance it was.

It's sad that open source / open-internet projects always have a clunky design. Here, the main screenshot, at the top, uses a monospaced System font. You might as well display a terminal and it's a wrap. To appeal to broader audiences:

- You both need to trigger the potential OSS contributors, with references to Debian, Ubuntu maybe, and appeal to big donors, which is another topic entirely,

- And ALSO have a design that triggers the broader audiences and therefore, very "turnkey", very packaged, very "Comment like and subscribe", one-click install on your NAS, etc. Privacy is then a characteristic but services are the real features.

I’m used to unraid for my home system. Is this an app that would run as a container across my jbod?

Curious how this compares to Cosmos Cloud (https://cosmos-cloud.io/).

I picked it a few years ago for much the same reason as anyone else (sick of this shit), and it's main attraction to me was it being a turnkey solution that focus security so i wasn't as likely to completely fuck everything important up.

I think a "simple" installation package would be very attractive to most people, and while cosmos has a lot of growing to do in order to be that, I'm still pretty happy with it.

I'm even more happy to see more in this space, because I'm just at the point of "do i stick with cosmos or do i start rolling it all myself" and god the leap is terrifying if you're thinking of exposing to the internet. I get it, but at the same time it feels like you're always one missed config away from a potential nightmare, and that's after the "welp guess this is my second job" problem.

I thought that Coolify had centralized auth.

The unified auth + inter-app permissions are the real differentiator vs Coolify/CapRover-style container hosts. Data tiers (local DBs vs S3/R2 archive) also look like the practical way to make Immich/Jellyfin viable without giant managed disks.

Never thought that people on HN would be seriously discussing an obviously vibe coded thing.

I really like the design man!

Like pikapod?

How does it deal with storage? Storage is always the weakest link in self hosting. Having a bunch of stateless containers is ultimately just a fancy docker compose file. Still valuable, but you need a proper story for storage. Ideally all storage would be on individual volumes per app and all backed up etc.

>claude in contibutors >python No, thanks

seems kind of like https://caprover.com/

a similar project which i think is a lot better than this (in fact it's so good i'm jealous of its genius) is https://exe.dev. It feels like something that hasn't really hit the mainstream yet but I suspect everyone will be talking about soon.

Meh. Maybe I'm a grinch, but I don't see this as easier. I have a little NUC running Ubuntu. Putting services on it is easy: PiHole, OwnCloud, Wireguard, etc.

the hardware is problem we all been struggling with

Cloudron?

> Apps are (rootless, hardened) containers, so it can run existing software with minimal changes - and in a reasonably secure sandbox.

WTF? I’m selling you a car with no brakes but it slows down reasonably fast?

systemd is all you need

> coolify: hosts containerized apps, but every app is an island with its own login and little integration with the host or other apps.

That’s not an issue tho, I want each application to be a separate login, so I can have one pointed to a different subdomain or domain not all in one login and location.

> nextcloud: slow and unreliable, and more enterprise-targeted now

What a load of bull.

I've been interested in something like this for awhile. Cloud or self hosting in-a-box. Should be simple for layman.

Seems weird not to mention Umbrel.

yunohost?

I remember back when I first got into self-hosting (over a decade ago), I had a Netgear READYNAS. People made a small amount of plugins you could install. But the CPU was ARM before that was cool (I think mine was actually SPARC!) so it was a lot of effort to get things to compile, so plugins were usually quite outdated.

Then I decided to painfully break out of vendor lock-in, built my own NAS with FreeNAS which was all the rage (still attached to a vendor, but at least I could control the hardware). This was before Docker really took off - the plugins were installed in FreeBSD jails. It worked for a while, but again, plugins could be woefully out of date and broken, upgrading the OS was a pain and would break all your plugins.

Through the 10+ years of this... I now follow two simple rules: - separate your network storage and application hosting. Yes, it complicates things a little bit with NFS setups but it is a forcing function for a more resilient setup - use the docker container provided by the maintainers or LinuxServer.io. Vendor maintained wrappers can be initially helpful but end up as a form of tech debt when they're abandoned or neutered - especially when they're freemium and the company starts looking to squeeze.

The quiet part of self-hosting is that it shifts the responsibility of security to the user. I'm sure cloudinabottle has more sensible defaults than provided docker containers, or builds in reverse proxies etc, but I doubt they're offering to take on liability for data loss or breaches.

The problem I see you'll face are two-fold: 1. Projects like this have the power users self-select away from it and those who need a lot of hand-holding to self-select into it. If I know how to configure and deploy a docker container already I have no incentive to contribute. ReadyNAS got around this by having folks charge for their plugins (that were just OSS projects packaged up for their OS) but then it ruins the appeal, they likely only got away with it because they were only a couple of bucks and you were already locked in to the ecosystem via the hardware. 2. If the hosted aspect actually makes you money, required for the project to be continued long term, capitalism will ensure that incumbent cloud providers take that away from you by offering ready-made instances at your cost-price, like they did with redis, elasticsearch etc.

Note that these are only issues if you're motivated by making a profit, or even a cost-neutral project. But if this is a charitable exercise backed by an entity that doesn't need the money, I wish you all the best - more things that let people dip their toes in are good! The cloud is all rent-seeking subscriptions and even with the recent supply shortages: fast, small, low-power compute is incredibly cheap these days, especially old business/mini machines.

"Forjejo"

No offense, but this is not accessible to everyone. Seriously, take a look at the setup instructions and tell me with a straight face that a 4 year old could set this up.

https://cloudinabottle.org/docs/setup/shared_homeserver.html

There's no reason this couldn't be made as simple as double clicking a .exe and then the whole thing gets setup.

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How do I reach out to you? We're building something that you might want to be a part of. (The "Safebox" comes with all the software you need, and you can just clone its AMI on AWS etc.) Would love to have a conversation.

If you want to message me, find my email on https://qbix.com/about

It's weird seeing someone trying to promote self-hosting, while building everything with Claude.

> In the pre-cloud days, open source worked - authors distributed their software, and everyone "hosted" it for themselves (i.e. ran it on their own PC)

This is just rose tinted vision of the past. None of the software of the past had the capability, reliability or robustness of modern sass.

In the age of LLM agents, still going for Docker/Podmam on anything besides local development box seems like a weird choice.

Docker has poor tooling for network level security between the containers, has issues with different runtimes per container, etc.

It is just a bit primitive if you want to expose multiple services to the internet on the same server. One of those apps will get compromised and then all the others will follow.

If you want a decent self hosted server, ask your frontier LLM agent of choice to configure kubernetes (on something like k3s) with mandatory userns mapping so nothing runs as root on the host, default deny firewall so inter-container communication is as locked down as possible, and if your router supports, set up VLANs so none of the containers can access your other devices on the LAN. Use something like backrest to handle backups, alertmanager and Grafana for monitoring, Keel for auto updates. Also consider separating ingress for public and internal services and use Tailscale with split DNS to acces the internal entrypoint. Set up Crowdsec as WAF and subscribe to their free blocklists to filter out bots. Ask it to set this all up using Ansible, so it can be maintained.

While this would be extremely time consuming to set up and maintain by hand, an agent can do and test it in a few hours.