12 ms·

Sandstorm Oasis hosting open beta and App Market

170 points by kentonv 11y ago

andersonmvd 11y ago
That's amazing. No more 70 vendors, just take your apps and host in your server. Cheaper and data under your control. I'm a big fan of this project :) Congrats!
kentonv 11y ago
One thing we'll do before coming out of beta is make sure we can scale seamlessly to these impromptu HN load tests. :) Sorry it's a bit slow right now! You can, of course, install your own and have all the resources to yourself: https://sandstorm.io/install/ https://sandstorm.io/install/ Edit: Things seem a bit better now. This is our first time getting a load spike on Blackrock (codename for the "enterprise" add-on to Sandstorm which can utilize a whole cluster, which we use to run Oasis); previously, it was always the single-machine demo. The problem is, ironically, we haven't parallelized our front-end yet. We are seamlessly distributing the apps themselves across way more machines than we actually need, but everyone is connecting to the same instance of the surrounding management UI. Honestly I didn't prioritize this because I thought our reinvented-wheel back-end was going to be the bigger bottleneck -- whoops. Luckily this shouldn't be too hard to fix as the front-end is mostly stateless. Probably fixed in a week or two. Nice to know what to focus on, in any case! Thanks for testing!
- kentonv 11y ago
  We now have four front-ends (and can add arbitrarily more, of course). Will be fun to see how things perform at the next spike.
seagreen 11y ago
Congratulations! I couldn't be more excited about this. The personal computer revolution won't be complete until users have personal servers. Desktops, laptops, smartphones -- none of them compare in importance to controlling your own server. Sandstorm is a great step in that direction. There's something very beautiful in how it "rolls with the blow" of how awful the web is. While Mozilla (sorry to pick on you guys) is just trying to force more JS everywhere, Sandstorm makes one small product and wildly improves what a web app means.
- severine 11y ago
  I fully agree, including the apology. I've just stumbled upon the update (upgrade?) on my self-hosted Sandstorm instance, which I just installed a week ago to try and learn. It feels (and looks, and works!) better. I'm one of the perfect use cases for Sandstorm -- I use Xubuntu and I've installed it in some friends and relatives' computers, I occasionally help people with "computer problems" and I might dabble with my systems and local network but I'm by no means a net/sysadmin or programmer, and yet I find the whole... ecosystem? (sorry, I can't find the word) fascinating. It's the best sci-fi you can read. But there is this huge gap that only I seem to see, and I feel Sandstorm could help filling that gap, between those that know how some of this "real sci-fi" works and those that, like me and lots and lots of my fellows, don't. Let the documentation improve. Hehe, I'm happy about some software thing...
- seagreen 11y ago
  Severine: you're hellbanned.
  - severine 11y ago
    Ha, I'm in heaven again! (thank you)
yebyen 11y ago
I have been happily using the Sandstorm closed alpha since it was available to Kickstarter users and I have been very happy with the progress. There are still places where the grain paradigm needs to be fleshed out a bit, like I had to explain to my old boss that in Sandstorm Gitlab there is no user, there are only allowed and deleted web keys... When I explained that we might use this for a project or two, if it turned out to be too much trouble to put our GitLab instance with all its private repos on the public internet, he understood right away. Up until that point he basically knew what Sandstorm was all about and he was saying "I don't think Sandstorm is for us." I'm still not sure he sees, but the free open beta and the app store will probably work to help convert him. He loves app stores. (Why not add, a shameless plug for Synology DSM OS with its Docker Hub support!)
cstrahan 11y ago
Congrats, team Sandstorm! Just played around with the new UI, looks great! Looking forward to setting up an instance soon (or perhaps paying for hosting) :) The work you all are doing is awesome - keep it up!
wyldfire 11y ago
So, how do I manipulate these grains? I created a gitweb repo and I'd like to rename it, etc. But how?
- ocdtrekkie 11y ago
  If you click on the name of the grain at the top of your screen when it's open, it'll let you rename it! And Gitweb itself should present you with some basic instructions on setting up a webkey to push code to it.
  - wyldfire 11y ago
    > And Gitweb itself should present you with some basic instructions on setting up a webkey to push code to it. Yes, but the name of the repo itself has _RENAME_ME as its suffix and AFAICT there's no way to change it. It seems as if gitlab behaves this way too. EDIT: ok embarassing mistake on my part, it's all clear now.
    - kentonv 11y ago
      You're referring to the copy/pastable commands for setting up git, right? You can actually replace the _RENAME_ME thing (and the randomly-generated text before it) with whatever you want when you enter the command. The instructions could certainly use some work, though.
    - paulproteus 11y ago
      Hi wyldfire, I hope you don't stay embarrassed. We could improve parts of the interface, and we need feedback like this to know what people think is going on, so that we can decide how to change the interface to show people what is actually going on. Thanks for leaving the comment and I hope you enjoy using Sandstorm!
      - wyldfire 11y ago
        I think in general it's related to the conceptual shift Sandstorm is trying to drive. There's a lot of touting "control of your own data" and it took a while for that to sink in for me. I think it took so long because it's so different from what I'm used to. It seems like a powerful idea but challenging to make sure your customers' expectations are managed. The sidebar/navbar clearly is part of the strategy, well done there. But the gulf that exists between the specific-app content pane and the sandstorm navbar is the tricky bit.
makmanalp 11y ago
Oh my god, this is magic - it took 10 seconds to install wordpress. I'm buying an account for my mom. It'd be awesome to know the pricing for the managed hosting!
- kentonv 11y ago
  Sorry, we spent so much time making the billing prompt a seamless part of the flow of using Sandstorm that we forgot to publish the pricing outside of that. You can see pricing if you sign in, go to your account settings, and click "change plan". (It's $6/mo for the standard plan, which is probably enough for most people.)
  - kentonv 11y ago
    Oh, but note that all plans are free during the beta period, which will last at least a few months. :)
- kasbah 11y ago
  Looks like it will be 6$/mo: https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2015-08-31-oasis-beta-launch.html https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2015-08-31-oasis-beta-launch....
andrewstuart 11y ago
Offtopic from Sandstorm but on the topic of personal servers it would be good if somehow an email server could also respond to requests as a web server in some way. Or maybe respond to particular inbound emails as HTTP requests. Sort of makes sense since the server that your email address lives at is kind of your "home on the web". You could configure your email then perhaps to respond with things like your personal profile, in response to anonymous inbound requests.
- paulproteus 11y ago
  That's something that should be possible in a Sandstorm app, if you want to make it do that. (-: To do it securely in Sandstorm would have to wait for our secure inter-app communication system, similar to Android intents, called the Powerbox. But we're working on it.
ykumar6 11y ago
Simple question to the founders, in a world where software is increasingly the sum of not just code, but cloud services and APIs; how does Sandstorm scale to real-world SaaS? Are you going to require your users to configure lots of API keys and services manually and manage these vendor relationships? How does Sandstorm create an update-model for SaaS when developers are deploying hundreds of changes a day? I like the idea, but I wonder if this idea would have worked better in an era when software wasn't always continuously evolving to the needs of customers
- kentonv 11y ago
  > how does Sandstorm scale to real-world SaaS? It doesn't! Sandstorm is the anti-SaaS. Sandstorm is all about running fine-grained instances of apps (e.g. a separate Etherpad instance for every document) in a decentralized way rather than huge centralized "scalable" SaaS apps. Supporting SaaS-style apps is explicitly a non-goal for us. Sandstorm is meant for people hosting personal servers for themselves or for businesses hosting corporate-internal apps for their employees; generally not for external-facing apps. It turns out that decentralized apps are trivial to scale, without any fancy distributed systems architecture. > Are you going to require your users to configure lots of API keys and services manually and manage these vendor relationships? No. "Managing vendor relationships" is not a thing that one needs to do in Sandstorm's usage model. Sandstorm apps are generally self-contained; they include all their code dependencies directly in the package, including the full stack of front-end, business logic, database, etc. The only time a Sandstorm app needs to reach out to other apps and services is when the app logically needs to interact with other objects. For example, imagine a chart app which renders charts based on the contents of a spreadsheet (another app). These apps need to be connected, but this kind of connection makes logical sense to an end user. They know what a chart is, they know what a spreadsheet is, and they know they need to connect them. Sandstorm will provide something we call the "powerbox UI" to allow users to create these connections in a user-friendly way. https://docs.sandstorm.io/en/latest/developing/security-practices/#capability-based-usable-security https://docs.sandstorm.io/en/latest/developing/security-prac... > How does Sandstorm create an update-model for SaaS when developers are deploying hundreds of changes a day? It's like mobile. You ship an app to the app market, and then users get updates from there.
jimmcslim 11y ago
Is there an official Docker image for running Sandstorm? I'd like to play around with it without installing it directly nor standing up a separate VM. I've also speculated in the past that Sandstorm would be something great to have on NASs of the QNAP, Synology variety... any progress in that direction?
- paulproteus 11y ago
  There isn't an official Docker image for now as far as I know, so your best bet is to make an Ubuntu 14.04 Docker container and run the regular Sandstorm installer within it. I agree it'd be great on NASs. I'm particularly excited about Synology ones since I know they have some x86-64 models. If you're interested in possibly helping out with that stuff, feel free to email community@sandstorm.io and I can see if there's a way we can give you a preview of that sooner rather than later.
- kentonv 11y ago
  Sandstorm actually self-containerizes. The installer unpacks a bundle under /opt/sandstorm which, when executed, runs itself in a container (Linux namespace) and mostly avoids interacting with the rest of the system. It also (with your permission) auto-updates itself within 24 hours of any release with near-zero downtime. I know that Docker-izing it could be more comfortable for people who are already familiar with launching Docker images, and similarly Debian packages would be more comfortable to long-time Debian users, etc. But, these other distribution mechanisms would have significant technical disadvantages compared to what we have (and what we are building), while adding some significant maintenance cost for us. So we've decided not to pursue them for now. That said, it might make more sense when we have a "stable release". Regarding Synology, they actually sent us a test unit that we plan to play with at some point... so much to do, so little time.
  - jimmcslim 11y ago
    > Sandstorm actually self-containerizes. Ok, that's interesting... so hopefully it wouldn't conflict with my Docker install and its containers at all (other than port numbers I suppose).
andybak 11y ago
Minor gripe. I can't figure out how to make etherpads public by default. Which rather kills the primary use-case of etherpads for me (frictionless collaborative documents - non-guessable urls are the only authentication)
- kentonv 11y ago
  Use the "share" button in the top bar to create a sharing link. :)
  - andybak 11y ago
    OK. I'm an idiot. I'll tell you why I didn't suss this out (and I think this is a geek blind spot more than a true UX flaw). 1. I decided all the options FOR the app would be inside the part of the screen owned by the app (i.e. not the top bar). So I only looked there. 2. I was expecting the url in the browser's address bar to be shareable.
    - paulproteus 11y ago
      Hi andybak, I work on the Sandstorm team and it seems pretty clear that you're not an idiot. I'll see if there's something we can do to make this essential UI element more discoverable. To some extent, it's a matter of learning about Sandstorm -- Sandstorm's role in the web app ecosystem is basically to add sharing & access control, so maybe everyone has to learn this. But hopefully we can help people figure it out more easily.
      - unhammer 11y ago
        Some more UI feedback for you then: It did take me a while to figure out how to delete "grains" (I would've thought from the list of grains, instead I had to open one and click the delete button). Also, I don't quite understand why I started out with five wekan grains from the get-go? Maybe a bug. Also, I think first-time users might need some more hints (like unintrusive first-run popups or something) that the top bar is the Sandstorm stuff, while the rest is the app itself. I don't know what would be the best way, it seems quite challenging to design something like this :-) What does the key icon do? (No hover text.) Maybe "Share" should say "Share app"? (So I don't get confused into thinking it means "share this one wekan note" or "share this particular song from groovebasin".)
zimbatm 11y ago
Tough question: how do you see the developer getting paid for their work ? I would love to be able to work on Open-Source apps and might occasionally build some for free but at the end of the day I still need money to pay my rent and all. The answer to that is probably central to what kind/quality of application that you will get on the market.
- ocdtrekkie 11y ago
  I know they want to heavily support the "pay what you want" model, as a way to appreciate and reward open source developers for their work. Proprietary apps are supported too, kentonv mentions in-app payments specifically. Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10150249 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10150249
- kentonv 11y ago
  To be clear, we aren't exclusively for open source apps. We in fact have one proprietary app on the app market today (draw.io). We want to help developers get paid for their work by making it really easy to get paid. Sandstorm Oasis users will already have a credit card on file; we want to make it easy for them to use that card for in-app purchases. In the case of open source apps, we want to make it easy for app developers to solicit "tips", perhaps by implementing this as part of the Sandstorm UI -- if you use an open source app a lot, the UI could (hopefully not overly intrusively) say "Hey, would you consider giving a weekly tip to this developer?" I've also thought about a "spotify" model where we automatically pass along some portion of subscription fees to apps that get used a lot. Of course, things are more complicated for personal servers where the user doesn't necessarily have payment methods on file. We're still thinking about how that will work, but we'll come up with something.
appleflaxen 11y ago
This is freaking awesome. I love it. Definitely in for the $6 hosted version, once you guys are out of beta. Seriously... wonderful work.
- kentonv 11y ago
  Well all the plans are free during beta so you might as well sign up now. :D
escherize 11y ago
I'd be very interested in a hackpad demo on sandstorm. It's nice to see Etherpad and Wave though!
- ocdtrekkie 11y ago
  I know Hackpad has been excitedly discussed on #sandstorm before.
mjnaus 11y ago
Are you guys planning on adding paid/premium apps to your app store?
- ocdtrekkie 11y ago
  I believe they intend to support that in the future, yes.
- kentonv 11y ago
  Yes. Probably not in the form of upfront payments, but rather in-app purchases -- including a "pay what you want" system for open source apps.
technofiend 11y ago
This is exciting. I would love rstudio here.
beilabs 11y ago
Awesome job guys. Any chance that you'll have apps like Dashing on the horizon? Containerised dashboard monitoring....
- beilabs 11y ago
  also, Jekyll support pretty please.....
  - ocdtrekkie 11y ago
    The 'Hacker CMS' app is actually based on Jekyll, I believe. It can be a bit kludgy at times, but works.
- ocdtrekkie 11y ago
  If you request on the sandstorm-dev list (it's a Google Group) an app, someone might want to port it, or add it to the app voting list. If you're developer-inclined, you can even package apps yourself, Sandstorm has pretty decent dev tools. Though, depending on what you want to monitor, the ideal drivers to let the app talk to things outside of Sandstorm may not be ready yet.
unhammer 11y ago
Would it be possible to use this to host a Weechat instance with http://www.glowing-bear.org/ http://www.glowing-bear.org/ ? (I mean, the UI of course, but weechat itself is a bit challenging, since you need to generate an ssl cert, open some ports and whatnot.)
- paulproteus 11y ago
  Yes -- that would work great! With a caveat -- apps have no network access in Sandstorm by default. The way apps can get network access is that (soon) there will be a way to have one program called an "IRC driver" receive real network access, and then it would export the capability to speak to IRC servers to other apps. An Android intents-like chooser would let the user pick/install an IRC driver, if an app needs one. The general idea is that if an app needs IRC access, it can bother the user once to get it, and if it doesn't need IRC access, then it shouldn't ever have access to IRC (or the network). This isn't ready yet, but good golly am I excited for us to finish it up so I can tell all my friends that Sandstorm is the easiest way to run an IRC bouncer.
mintplant 11y ago
Do you plan on supporting paid apps in the future, or will Oasis be sticking to free only? I can imagine a one-off payments or subscription models where users pay for continuous updates, funding further development.
- ocdtrekkie 11y ago
  kentonv answers that mostly here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10150249 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10150249

170 points by kentonv 11y ago

That's amazing. No more 70 vendors, just take your apps and host in your server. Cheaper and data under your control. I'm a big fan of this project :) Congrats!

kentonv 11y ago

One thing we'll do before coming out of beta is make sure we can scale seamlessly to these impromptu HN load tests. :) Sorry it's a bit slow right now! You can, of course, install your own and have all the resources to yourself: https://sandstorm.io/install/ https://sandstorm.io/install/ Edit: Things seem a bit better now. This is our first time getting a load spike on Blackrock (codename for the "enterprise" add-on to Sandstorm which can utilize a whole cluster, which we use to run Oasis); previously, it was always the single-machine demo. The problem is, ironically, we haven't parallelized our front-end yet. We are seamlessly distributing the apps themselves across way more machines than we actually need, but everyone is connecting to the same instance of the surrounding management UI. Honestly I didn't prioritize this because I thought our reinvented-wheel back-end was going to be the bigger bottleneck -- whoops. Luckily this shouldn't be too hard to fix as the front-end is mostly stateless. Probably fixed in a week or two. Nice to know what to focus on, in any case! Thanks for testing!

kentonv 11y ago
We now have four front-ends (and can add arbitrarily more, of course). Will be fun to see how things perform at the next spike.

seagreen 11y ago

Congratulations! I couldn't be more excited about this. The personal computer revolution won't be complete until users have personal servers. Desktops, laptops, smartphones -- none of them compare in importance to controlling your own server. Sandstorm is a great step in that direction. There's something very beautiful in how it "rolls with the blow" of how awful the web is. While Mozilla (sorry to pick on you guys) is just trying to force more JS everywhere, Sandstorm makes one small product and wildly improves what a web app means.

severine 11y ago
I fully agree, including the apology. I've just stumbled upon the update (upgrade?) on my self-hosted Sandstorm instance, which I just installed a week ago to try and learn. It feels (and looks, and works!) better. I'm one of the perfect use cases for Sandstorm -- I use Xubuntu and I've installed it in some friends and relatives' computers, I occasionally help people with "computer problems" and I might dabble with my systems and local network but I'm by no means a net/sysadmin or programmer, and yet I find the whole... ecosystem? (sorry, I can't find the word) fascinating. It's the best sci-fi you can read. But there is this huge gap that only I seem to see, and I feel Sandstorm could help filling that gap, between those that know how some of this "real sci-fi" works and those that, like me and lots and lots of my fellows, don't. Let the documentation improve. Hehe, I'm happy about some software thing...
seagreen 11y ago
Severine: you're hellbanned.
- severine 11y ago
  Ha, I'm in heaven again! (thank you)

yebyen 11y ago

I have been happily using the Sandstorm closed alpha since it was available to Kickstarter users and I have been very happy with the progress. There are still places where the grain paradigm needs to be fleshed out a bit, like I had to explain to my old boss that in Sandstorm Gitlab there is no user, there are only allowed and deleted web keys... When I explained that we might use this for a project or two, if it turned out to be too much trouble to put our GitLab instance with all its private repos on the public internet, he understood right away. Up until that point he basically knew what Sandstorm was all about and he was saying "I don't think Sandstorm is for us." I'm still not sure he sees, but the free open beta and the app store will probably work to help convert him. He loves app stores. (Why not add, a shameless plug for Synology DSM OS with its Docker Hub support!)

cstrahan 11y ago

Congrats, team Sandstorm! Just played around with the new UI, looks great! Looking forward to setting up an instance soon (or perhaps paying for hosting) :) The work you all are doing is awesome - keep it up!

wyldfire 11y ago

So, how do I manipulate these grains? I created a gitweb repo and I'd like to rename it, etc. But how?

ocdtrekkie 11y ago
If you click on the name of the grain at the top of your screen when it's open, it'll let you rename it! And Gitweb itself should present you with some basic instructions on setting up a webkey to push code to it.
- wyldfire 11y ago
  > And Gitweb itself should present you with some basic instructions on setting up a webkey to push code to it. Yes, but the name of the repo itself has _RENAME_ME as its suffix and AFAICT there's no way to change it. It seems as if gitlab behaves this way too. EDIT: ok embarassing mistake on my part, it's all clear now.
  - kentonv 11y ago
    You're referring to the copy/pastable commands for setting up git, right? You can actually replace the _RENAME_ME thing (and the randomly-generated text before it) with whatever you want when you enter the command. The instructions could certainly use some work, though.
  - paulproteus 11y ago
    Hi wyldfire, I hope you don't stay embarrassed. We could improve parts of the interface, and we need feedback like this to know what people think is going on, so that we can decide how to change the interface to show people what is actually going on. Thanks for leaving the comment and I hope you enjoy using Sandstorm!
    - wyldfire 11y ago
      I think in general it's related to the conceptual shift Sandstorm is trying to drive. There's a lot of touting "control of your own data" and it took a while for that to sink in for me. I think it took so long because it's so different from what I'm used to. It seems like a powerful idea but challenging to make sure your customers' expectations are managed. The sidebar/navbar clearly is part of the strategy, well done there. But the gulf that exists between the specific-app content pane and the sandstorm navbar is the tricky bit.

makmanalp 11y ago

Oh my god, this is magic - it took 10 seconds to install wordpress. I'm buying an account for my mom. It'd be awesome to know the pricing for the managed hosting!

kentonv 11y ago
Sorry, we spent so much time making the billing prompt a seamless part of the flow of using Sandstorm that we forgot to publish the pricing outside of that. You can see pricing if you sign in, go to your account settings, and click "change plan". (It's $6/mo for the standard plan, which is probably enough for most people.)
- kentonv 11y ago
  Oh, but note that all plans are free during the beta period, which will last at least a few months. :)
kasbah 11y ago
Looks like it will be 6$/mo: https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2015-08-31-oasis-beta-launch.html https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2015-08-31-oasis-beta-launch....

andrewstuart 11y ago

Offtopic from Sandstorm but on the topic of personal servers it would be good if somehow an email server could also respond to requests as a web server in some way. Or maybe respond to particular inbound emails as HTTP requests. Sort of makes sense since the server that your email address lives at is kind of your "home on the web". You could configure your email then perhaps to respond with things like your personal profile, in response to anonymous inbound requests.

paulproteus 11y ago
That's something that should be possible in a Sandstorm app, if you want to make it do that. (-: To do it securely in Sandstorm would have to wait for our secure inter-app communication system, similar to Android intents, called the Powerbox. But we're working on it.

ykumar6 11y ago

Simple question to the founders, in a world where software is increasingly the sum of not just code, but cloud services and APIs; how does Sandstorm scale to real-world SaaS? Are you going to require your users to configure lots of API keys and services manually and manage these vendor relationships? How does Sandstorm create an update-model for SaaS when developers are deploying hundreds of changes a day? I like the idea, but I wonder if this idea would have worked better in an era when software wasn't always continuously evolving to the needs of customers

kentonv 11y ago
> how does Sandstorm scale to real-world SaaS? It doesn't! Sandstorm is the anti-SaaS. Sandstorm is all about running fine-grained instances of apps (e.g. a separate Etherpad instance for every document) in a decentralized way rather than huge centralized "scalable" SaaS apps. Supporting SaaS-style apps is explicitly a non-goal for us. Sandstorm is meant for people hosting personal servers for themselves or for businesses hosting corporate-internal apps for their employees; generally not for external-facing apps. It turns out that decentralized apps are trivial to scale, without any fancy distributed systems architecture. > Are you going to require your users to configure lots of API keys and services manually and manage these vendor relationships? No. "Managing vendor relationships" is not a thing that one needs to do in Sandstorm's usage model. Sandstorm apps are generally self-contained; they include all their code dependencies directly in the package, including the full stack of front-end, business logic, database, etc. The only time a Sandstorm app needs to reach out to other apps and services is when the app logically needs to interact with other objects. For example, imagine a chart app which renders charts based on the contents of a spreadsheet (another app). These apps need to be connected, but this kind of connection makes logical sense to an end user. They know what a chart is, they know what a spreadsheet is, and they know they need to connect them. Sandstorm will provide something we call the "powerbox UI" to allow users to create these connections in a user-friendly way. https://docs.sandstorm.io/en/latest/developing/security-practices/#capability-based-usable-security https://docs.sandstorm.io/en/latest/developing/security-prac... > How does Sandstorm create an update-model for SaaS when developers are deploying hundreds of changes a day? It's like mobile. You ship an app to the app market, and then users get updates from there.

jimmcslim 11y ago

Is there an official Docker image for running Sandstorm? I'd like to play around with it without installing it directly nor standing up a separate VM. I've also speculated in the past that Sandstorm would be something great to have on NASs of the QNAP, Synology variety... any progress in that direction?

paulproteus 11y ago
There isn't an official Docker image for now as far as I know, so your best bet is to make an Ubuntu 14.04 Docker container and run the regular Sandstorm installer within it. I agree it'd be great on NASs. I'm particularly excited about Synology ones since I know they have some x86-64 models. If you're interested in possibly helping out with that stuff, feel free to email community@sandstorm.io and I can see if there's a way we can give you a preview of that sooner rather than later.
kentonv 11y ago
Sandstorm actually self-containerizes. The installer unpacks a bundle under /opt/sandstorm which, when executed, runs itself in a container (Linux namespace) and mostly avoids interacting with the rest of the system. It also (with your permission) auto-updates itself within 24 hours of any release with near-zero downtime. I know that Docker-izing it could be more comfortable for people who are already familiar with launching Docker images, and similarly Debian packages would be more comfortable to long-time Debian users, etc. But, these other distribution mechanisms would have significant technical disadvantages compared to what we have (and what we are building), while adding some significant maintenance cost for us. So we've decided not to pursue them for now. That said, it might make more sense when we have a "stable release". Regarding Synology, they actually sent us a test unit that we plan to play with at some point... so much to do, so little time.
- jimmcslim 11y ago
  > Sandstorm actually self-containerizes. Ok, that's interesting... so hopefully it wouldn't conflict with my Docker install and its containers at all (other than port numbers I suppose).

andybak 11y ago

Minor gripe. I can't figure out how to make etherpads public by default. Which rather kills the primary use-case of etherpads for me (frictionless collaborative documents - non-guessable urls are the only authentication)

kentonv 11y ago
Use the "share" button in the top bar to create a sharing link. :)
- andybak 11y ago
  OK. I'm an idiot. I'll tell you why I didn't suss this out (and I think this is a geek blind spot more than a true UX flaw). 1. I decided all the options FOR the app would be inside the part of the screen owned by the app (i.e. not the top bar). So I only looked there. 2. I was expecting the url in the browser's address bar to be shareable.
  - paulproteus 11y ago
    Hi andybak, I work on the Sandstorm team and it seems pretty clear that you're not an idiot. I'll see if there's something we can do to make this essential UI element more discoverable. To some extent, it's a matter of learning about Sandstorm -- Sandstorm's role in the web app ecosystem is basically to add sharing & access control, so maybe everyone has to learn this. But hopefully we can help people figure it out more easily.
    - unhammer 11y ago
      Some more UI feedback for you then: It did take me a while to figure out how to delete "grains" (I would've thought from the list of grains, instead I had to open one and click the delete button). Also, I don't quite understand why I started out with five wekan grains from the get-go? Maybe a bug. Also, I think first-time users might need some more hints (like unintrusive first-run popups or something) that the top bar is the Sandstorm stuff, while the rest is the app itself. I don't know what would be the best way, it seems quite challenging to design something like this :-) What does the key icon do? (No hover text.) Maybe "Share" should say "Share app"? (So I don't get confused into thinking it means "share this one wekan note" or "share this particular song from groovebasin".)

zimbatm 11y ago

Tough question: how do you see the developer getting paid for their work ? I would love to be able to work on Open-Source apps and might occasionally build some for free but at the end of the day I still need money to pay my rent and all. The answer to that is probably central to what kind/quality of application that you will get on the market.

ocdtrekkie 11y ago
I know they want to heavily support the "pay what you want" model, as a way to appreciate and reward open source developers for their work. Proprietary apps are supported too, kentonv mentions in-app payments specifically. Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10150249 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10150249
kentonv 11y ago
To be clear, we aren't exclusively for open source apps. We in fact have one proprietary app on the app market today (draw.io). We want to help developers get paid for their work by making it really easy to get paid. Sandstorm Oasis users will already have a credit card on file; we want to make it easy for them to use that card for in-app purchases. In the case of open source apps, we want to make it easy for app developers to solicit "tips", perhaps by implementing this as part of the Sandstorm UI -- if you use an open source app a lot, the UI could (hopefully not overly intrusively) say "Hey, would you consider giving a weekly tip to this developer?" I've also thought about a "spotify" model where we automatically pass along some portion of subscription fees to apps that get used a lot. Of course, things are more complicated for personal servers where the user doesn't necessarily have payment methods on file. We're still thinking about how that will work, but we'll come up with something.

appleflaxen 11y ago

This is freaking awesome. I love it. Definitely in for the $6 hosted version, once you guys are out of beta. Seriously... wonderful work.

kentonv 11y ago
Well all the plans are free during beta so you might as well sign up now. :D

escherize 11y ago

I'd be very interested in a hackpad demo on sandstorm. It's nice to see Etherpad and Wave though!

ocdtrekkie 11y ago
I know Hackpad has been excitedly discussed on #sandstorm before.

mjnaus 11y ago

Are you guys planning on adding paid/premium apps to your app store?

ocdtrekkie 11y ago
I believe they intend to support that in the future, yes.
kentonv 11y ago
Yes. Probably not in the form of upfront payments, but rather in-app purchases -- including a "pay what you want" system for open source apps.

technofiend 11y ago

This is exciting. I would love rstudio here.

beilabs 11y ago

Awesome job guys. Any chance that you'll have apps like Dashing on the horizon? Containerised dashboard monitoring....

beilabs 11y ago
also, Jekyll support pretty please.....
- ocdtrekkie 11y ago
  The 'Hacker CMS' app is actually based on Jekyll, I believe. It can be a bit kludgy at times, but works.
ocdtrekkie 11y ago
If you request on the sandstorm-dev list (it's a Google Group) an app, someone might want to port it, or add it to the app voting list. If you're developer-inclined, you can even package apps yourself, Sandstorm has pretty decent dev tools. Though, depending on what you want to monitor, the ideal drivers to let the app talk to things outside of Sandstorm may not be ready yet.

unhammer 11y ago

Would it be possible to use this to host a Weechat instance with http://www.glowing-bear.org/ http://www.glowing-bear.org/ ? (I mean, the UI of course, but weechat itself is a bit challenging, since you need to generate an ssl cert, open some ports and whatnot.)

paulproteus 11y ago
Yes -- that would work great! With a caveat -- apps have no network access in Sandstorm by default. The way apps can get network access is that (soon) there will be a way to have one program called an "IRC driver" receive real network access, and then it would export the capability to speak to IRC servers to other apps. An Android intents-like chooser would let the user pick/install an IRC driver, if an app needs one. The general idea is that if an app needs IRC access, it can bother the user once to get it, and if it doesn't need IRC access, then it shouldn't ever have access to IRC (or the network). This isn't ready yet, but good golly am I excited for us to finish it up so I can tell all my friends that Sandstorm is the easiest way to run an IRC bouncer.

mintplant 11y ago

Do you plan on supporting paid apps in the future, or will Oasis be sticking to free only? I can imagine a one-off payments or subscription models where users pay for continuous updates, funding further development.

ocdtrekkie 11y ago
kentonv answers that mostly here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10150249 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10150249