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In the middle of building a self-hosting setup at home so I went ahead and installed this to give it a trial run. I generally like the interface and think it is

In the middle of building a self-hosting setup at home so I went ahead and installed this to give it a trial run. I generally like the interface and think it is a nice take on making self-hosting easier, but I have some pure stream of conscious criticism: 1. There sure are a lot of crypto apps. I'm not vehemently anti-crypto, but it is missing some "obvious" applications and full of those, so I'm curious what the play was there. They're all spread all over the place isntead of in a single category too. There are non-crypto finance apps that are self-hosted (Actual, BudgE, etc.), please don't mix them. 2. Plex and/or jellyfin stand out as huge misses right out of the gate. 3. I am surprised that it doesn't use nginx proxy manager with preset configs to make this all available from a single domain. Needs letsencrypt + a DDNS provider too while you're at it. 4. Why no blog/cms? 5. Can I give it the docker-compose config for an application not on the app store somewhere in GUI? 6. Wait, why is this accessible from Tor? And I can't turn it off? Nope nope nope.

forum_ghost 4y ago
> missing some "obvious" applications what would that be?
- declon 4y ago
  > Plex and/or jellyfin stand out as huge misses right out of the gate.
nullcipher 4y ago
why is there so much crypto stuff? Probably me but by default I don't trust things that are crypto related.
- ibz 4y ago
  Umbrel started as a way to easily host a Bitcoin node, so naturally there is plenty of Bitcoin related stuff. I think they only have one crypto (ie non-Bitcoin) app though.
wmf 4y ago
Umbrel started as a crypto-focused project before branching out to general self-hosting: http://web.archive.org/web/20200726114748/https://getumbrel.com/ http://web.archive.org/web/20200726114748/https://getumbrel....
SLWW 4y ago
With Tailscale, and the Tor accessibility you would think even a simple blog application as well as plex/Jellyfin would be default out the gate. Right now my home theater setup could use something easier then what i kludged together over a weekend.
jonstaab 4y ago
It's accessible by tor because it's primarily a bitcoin/lightning node. If you're not interested in that core value prop, umbrel isn't for you.
- pooper 4y ago
  I am amazed to see people are interested in running Bitcoin nodes. As far as I know, none of the people I have talked to about Bitcoin or shit coins have any interest in running a full node. This is the thing that convinced me that cryptocurrency is a fad or worse a place people see to make a quick buck. When I looked into it, a Bitcoin node took over 300GB of space on your computer. I'd imagine that is over 600 GB now. Is anyone running full nodes on a raspberry pi?
  - janandonly 4y ago
    There have never been more people that run their own bitcoin/lightning node then there are right now. See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31673886 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31673886
    - pooper 4y ago
      I'm glad to see that there are sixteen thousand full nodes because the last I heard there were fewer than ten thousand. I have never spent actual currency to get Bitcoin but I cannot imagine being serious enough about Bitcoin to put tens of thousands of dollars in Bitcoin but then putting that money in Coinbase or something like that. (sorry YC, I know I was wrong about Dropbox and but I think I am still correct about Coinbase).
  - 3np 4y ago
    Many people do. A large part of Umbrels initial user base falls in that category. A reliable enough 1TB SSD costs <$100. A full bitcoin node takes ~500GB today.
  - jonstaab 4y ago
    I run one, it's quite easy and reasonably cheap. I admit the main value prop is feeling smug about your opsec, but the self-sovereignty thesis and culture of bitcoin are genuinely important. A small minority of people (nerds) running their own nodes is a way to keep the wider network more honest and help regular people benefit from using it.
mayankchhabra 4y ago
Thanks for the taking the time to try Umbrel out, great observations! 1. Re crypto apps, I figured some additional context may help. Before our today's release, Umbrel was a self-hosting OS primarily geared towards Bitcoin node users. Today, we migrated the Bitcoin node to the Umbrel App Store and took the last step in our transition to becoming an app-agnostic general purpose OS. So expect to see a lot more non-Bitcoin apps hereon! 2. Yes, agree. We'll have Plex and Jellyfin live in the app store soon. 3. The main issue we found with using a single domain on the local network is that many Android phones and PCS have flaky mDNS support, in which case name resolution for "*.local" would simply fail. This is why we decided to use ports. Perhaps we can look into using ports on the local network and domain on a VPS. 4. Good suggestion! Feel free to share your recommendations. 5. That's not possible using the UI, but you can create your own custom docker-compose app by following our app framework documentation: https://github.com/getumbrel/umbrel-apps/blob/master/README.md https://github.com/getumbrel/umbrel-apps/blob/master/README.... 6. Until now, a common use case of our users has been remote connection between Umbrel and their Bitcoin wallets over Tor. This is why remote access was baked directly into Umbrel and turned-on by default. However, as we've now evolved from the Bitcoin space, we'll prioritize offering the ability to disable remote Tor access functionality in the next update, and make it opt-in instead of opt-out.
- pbronez 4y ago
  I’m pleased to see the support for deploying directly to your own Umbrel without going through the App Store / pull request process. This is one of my biggest frustrations with Unraid. It would be nice to have first class support for deploying stuff this way - not just for testing. I would like to deploy custom containers / compositions on my Umbrel and see them alongside stuff installed from the official repository. Ok to require an external guy repo as upstream for this, but better to work entirely local.
- adastra22 4y ago
  You should add an ability to turn off tor access if you don’t currently have it for sure. But why make it opt-in?
- francislavoie 4y ago
pbronez 4y ago
#5 is very interesting to me. I use (and paid for!) Unraid. It’s generally quite good. Their Community Apps plug-in scratches the same itch as the Umbrel App Store. I run several community-maintained of services with it, but it is… unclear… how to spin up your own image. From what I can tell (and I might be dumb) you can’t really run a Docker image on Unraid unless you: 1) write an XML file using an undocumented schema 2) build and upload your image to Docker hub 3) get your container listed in community apps Now I’m SURE it’s not actually that dumb. But I couldn’t figure it out before I got distracted, and thus I haven’t done it. All the “documentation” is exclusively forum threads. What little formal documentation exists is obsolete. It really feels like it’s set up for a core community of developers rather than the users. Coming from that experience, I was impressed with a couple things about Umbrel as I read through OP: (1) they have clear documentation on how to publish something to their App Store (2) they have a documented YAML that handles most of the configuration (3) they take an active role in curating the App Store. They claim to help you put together a nice listing. (4) they have some actual tools to test your package (5) the App Store has a concept of cross-app dependencies. They give the example of a blockchain explorer that needs a bitcoin node running. Very cool! I want to use this functionality to have one RDBMS, one git host, one logging service, etc all shared by the various apps I deploy.
- francislavoie 4y ago
  Yeah, that's my biggest gripe with Unraid. Give me a way to write my own Dockerfile without having to SSH into the server! As an OSS maintainer of a project that supports custom builds with plugins, this is basically necessary for some users to use our project.
PontifexMinimus 4y ago
> 4. Why no blog/cms? Would it be possible to run Mastodon on this? With it being behind a domestic firewall, would that make it harder to other Mastodon instances to talk to it? Ditto for other ActivityPub software. I'd like to see a world where anyone can easily set up and run their own social media from a Pi running on their home network.

forum_ghost 4y ago

> missing some "obvious" applications what would that be?

declon 4y ago
> Plex and/or jellyfin stand out as huge misses right out of the gate.

nullcipher 4y ago

why is there so much crypto stuff? Probably me but by default I don't trust things that are crypto related.

ibz 4y ago
Umbrel started as a way to easily host a Bitcoin node, so naturally there is plenty of Bitcoin related stuff. I think they only have one crypto (ie non-Bitcoin) app though.

wmf 4y ago

Umbrel started as a crypto-focused project before branching out to general self-hosting: http://web.archive.org/web/20200726114748/https://getumbrel.com/ http://web.archive.org/web/20200726114748/https://getumbrel....

SLWW 4y ago

With Tailscale, and the Tor accessibility you would think even a simple blog application as well as plex/Jellyfin would be default out the gate. Right now my home theater setup could use something easier then what i kludged together over a weekend.

jonstaab 4y ago

It's accessible by tor because it's primarily a bitcoin/lightning node. If you're not interested in that core value prop, umbrel isn't for you.

pooper 4y ago
I am amazed to see people are interested in running Bitcoin nodes. As far as I know, none of the people I have talked to about Bitcoin or shit coins have any interest in running a full node. This is the thing that convinced me that cryptocurrency is a fad or worse a place people see to make a quick buck. When I looked into it, a Bitcoin node took over 300GB of space on your computer. I'd imagine that is over 600 GB now. Is anyone running full nodes on a raspberry pi?
- janandonly 4y ago
  There have never been more people that run their own bitcoin/lightning node then there are right now. See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31673886 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31673886
  - pooper 4y ago
    I'm glad to see that there are sixteen thousand full nodes because the last I heard there were fewer than ten thousand. I have never spent actual currency to get Bitcoin but I cannot imagine being serious enough about Bitcoin to put tens of thousands of dollars in Bitcoin but then putting that money in Coinbase or something like that. (sorry YC, I know I was wrong about Dropbox and but I think I am still correct about Coinbase).
- 3np 4y ago
  Many people do. A large part of Umbrels initial user base falls in that category. A reliable enough 1TB SSD costs <$100. A full bitcoin node takes ~500GB today.
- jonstaab 4y ago
  I run one, it's quite easy and reasonably cheap. I admit the main value prop is feeling smug about your opsec, but the self-sovereignty thesis and culture of bitcoin are genuinely important. A small minority of people (nerds) running their own nodes is a way to keep the wider network more honest and help regular people benefit from using it.

mayankchhabra 4y ago

Thanks for the taking the time to try Umbrel out, great observations! 1. Re crypto apps, I figured some additional context may help. Before our today's release, Umbrel was a self-hosting OS primarily geared towards Bitcoin node users. Today, we migrated the Bitcoin node to the Umbrel App Store and took the last step in our transition to becoming an app-agnostic general purpose OS. So expect to see a lot more non-Bitcoin apps hereon! 2. Yes, agree. We'll have Plex and Jellyfin live in the app store soon. 3. The main issue we found with using a single domain on the local network is that many Android phones and PCS have flaky mDNS support, in which case name resolution for "*.local" would simply fail. This is why we decided to use ports. Perhaps we can look into using ports on the local network and domain on a VPS. 4. Good suggestion! Feel free to share your recommendations. 5. That's not possible using the UI, but you can create your own custom docker-compose app by following our app framework documentation: https://github.com/getumbrel/umbrel-apps/blob/master/README.md https://github.com/getumbrel/umbrel-apps/blob/master/README.... 6. Until now, a common use case of our users has been remote connection between Umbrel and their Bitcoin wallets over Tor. This is why remote access was baked directly into Umbrel and turned-on by default. However, as we've now evolved from the Bitcoin space, we'll prioritize offering the ability to disable remote Tor access functionality in the next update, and make it opt-in instead of opt-out.

pbronez 4y ago
I’m pleased to see the support for deploying directly to your own Umbrel without going through the App Store / pull request process. This is one of my biggest frustrations with Unraid. It would be nice to have first class support for deploying stuff this way - not just for testing. I would like to deploy custom containers / compositions on my Umbrel and see them alongside stuff installed from the official repository. Ok to require an external guy repo as upstream for this, but better to work entirely local.
adastra22 4y ago
You should add an ability to turn off tor access if you don’t currently have it for sure. But why make it opt-in?
francislavoie 4y ago

pbronez 4y ago

#5 is very interesting to me. I use (and paid for!) Unraid. It’s generally quite good. Their Community Apps plug-in scratches the same itch as the Umbrel App Store. I run several community-maintained of services with it, but it is… unclear… how to spin up your own image. From what I can tell (and I might be dumb) you can’t really run a Docker image on Unraid unless you: 1) write an XML file using an undocumented schema 2) build and upload your image to Docker hub 3) get your container listed in community apps Now I’m SURE it’s not actually that dumb. But I couldn’t figure it out before I got distracted, and thus I haven’t done it. All the “documentation” is exclusively forum threads. What little formal documentation exists is obsolete. It really feels like it’s set up for a core community of developers rather than the users. Coming from that experience, I was impressed with a couple things about Umbrel as I read through OP: (1) they have clear documentation on how to publish something to their App Store (2) they have a documented YAML that handles most of the configuration (3) they take an active role in curating the App Store. They claim to help you put together a nice listing. (4) they have some actual tools to test your package (5) the App Store has a concept of cross-app dependencies. They give the example of a blockchain explorer that needs a bitcoin node running. Very cool! I want to use this functionality to have one RDBMS, one git host, one logging service, etc all shared by the various apps I deploy.

francislavoie 4y ago
Yeah, that's my biggest gripe with Unraid. Give me a way to write my own Dockerfile without having to SSH into the server! As an OSS maintainer of a project that supports custom builds with plugins, this is basically necessary for some users to use our project.

PontifexMinimus 4y ago

> 4. Why no blog/cms? Would it be possible to run Mastodon on this? With it being behind a domestic firewall, would that make it harder to other Mastodon instances to talk to it? Ditto for other ActivityPub software. I'd like to see a world where anyone can easily set up and run their own social media from a Pi running on their home network.