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Sandstorm- self-hostable web productivity suite

183 points by nalinidash 1y ago

docsaintly 1y ago
I looked into Sandstorm when I moved away from NethServer; I'm a strong believer in self-hosting. Sandstorm was too haphazard with apps and security of apps didn't seem to be their highest priority. I went with Cloudron, it's a nice mix of good app selection and security.
- wisty 1y ago
  Security was their highest priority. IIRC idea was that all security was done by sharing links (with capabilities) to documents.
- ferfumarma 1y ago
  The entire security model of sandstorm is incredibly strong. This criticism is hard to understand. Can you elaborate at all? Do you recall any specific issues?
  - jerf 1y ago
    The problem with the strong security is that it makes it expensive to port into the system. They also assumed more sharing than people actually seem interested in. I'm mostly just running apps that have no reason to share with each other because they each have their own domain anyhow. So the end result is the ecosystem was more expensive to join if you had an existing system than it might have been otherwise, and it inhibited getting projects onboarded. I am not the craziest self-hoster, but I've got several things now. I run a core syncthing node, Immich, Jellyfin, and Pihole. (Honorable mention I suppose to a Vaultwarden image, which is run on the public internet but my scripts treat it like it's another self-hosted option, rsync'ing it down locally and including it in the daily backup.) None of those are on Sandstorm, and a major reason why is the security system. They don't match it and porting it is a rather large amount of effort. I haven't used any of the self-hosting options, so I can't review if any of them are as nice as Sandstorm. All of the above is running in Docker on an Ubuntu N150 and a USB hard drive, home-grown, with a backup script (restic over S3, true backup) that covers them all. It ought to in principle do most of what Sandstorm does now by driving docker, albeit missing the sharing, which I can't say looked all that compelling anyhow, automatic backup integration, etc., because it really isn't all that hard to set up.
oulipo 1y ago
Cool, what would be the differences with a tool like https://dokploy.com/ https://dokploy.com/ ?
- mkl 1y ago
  That seems to be totally different. Sandstorm was a way of building your own private ~equivalent of Google Workspace out of existing open source web apps running in containers behind a common auth system.
meindnoch 1y ago
This still exists? Is anyone using it? What's the use case?
- neuroelectron 1y ago
  Imagine iCloud but you can manage more than 1,000 files at once, the files transfer much more quickly and don't have to use a touch interface that flakes out, plus no rent.
AceJohnny2 1y ago
Oh Sandstorm, what could've been... Taking from https://sandstorm.org/about https://sandstorm.org/about > Kenton Varda [NB: kentonv around here] launched Sandstorm in 2014 via an Indiegogo campaign, before co-founding Sandstorm Development Group with Jade Wang to develop Sandstorm as both a Software-as-a-Service [...] > In early 2017, Sandstorm Development Group ran out of funding and the team primarily joined Cloudflare. [NB: Where kentonv works to this day, leading the Cloud Workers team. Arguably related?] [...] > In 2020, a group of Sandstorm enthusiasts began a community effort to revive development of Sandstorm. [...] As of 2022, Sandstorm Development Group has been completely dissolved, and development of the Sandstorm project has transitioned to a community-run model. kentonv actually posted a recap of the history, including the tragic passing of Ian "zenhack" Denhart who was leading the community effort https://sandstorm.io/news/2024-01-14-move-to-sandstorm-org https://sandstorm.io/news/2024-01-14-move-to-sandstorm-org
- swah 1y ago
  What could have been? I remember being so excited about this at that point, I was sure it was going to take a significant chunk of [famous web services still around]. They even send me stickers for Cap'n'proto..
  - aesh2Xa1 1y ago
    If I understood it well enough, the intention was to formalize/standardize self-hosting such that it became easier (and with an emphasis on security). With that done well, perhaps the next step would have been ready-made images. I could see it reducing friction for people if they'd rent a VPS, upload an ISO/IMG, and the resulting system was reliably secure. Then they'd use the Sandstorm interface to install apps with a web GUI. There is still a roadmap documented here: https://github.com/sandstorm-io/sandstorm/tree/master/roadmap/self-hosting https://github.com/sandstorm-io/sandstorm/tree/master/roadma...
MissTake 1y ago
Is it just me, or is Sandstorm just not maintained any more? The most recent closed issues were self closed rather than as the result of development, while meanwhile the open issues continue to pile up with virtually no code changes made to the tree… It’s a shame because it seems like it could have been a thing. Sadly though it’s hard to justify time investment into a platform like this if you know there’s little to no chance of getting any issues fixed.
- crabmusket 1y ago
  There is a small community maintaining it - there should be a link to the Zulip on the website - but it is a small group and a complex beast. Some effort is going into a rewrite that keeps the same app/security model, but moves from C++ to Go and simplifies the database layer. I believe that's taking up a fair bit of contributor energy.
- benatkin 1y ago
  They didn’t quite reach the MVP level and so in a way it wasn’t really maintained in the early days either.
  - crabmusket 1y ago
    I don't know about that, I happily use it to host a couple of Wekan and Dokuwiki instances, and some random Etherpad docs. It's certainly MVP-complete. And even in its current state, it has some fantastic affordances that I don't feel I could get anywhere else. For example, I had an instance running on my laptop to fiddle around with developing apps. I wanted to take a Dokuwiki on my laptop and move it to my cloud-hosted instance. I clicked "download backup" of the grain, which gave me a zip file which was whatever, 40MB or something, and then I went into my cloud setup, clicked "import from backup", and voila - my entire Dokuwiki grain was now in the cloud.
- ocdtrekkie 1y ago
  There is a small community working on it (hi!) but there is several hard problems in the way of moving forward, all of which can be solved with time and money, neither of which we have a lot of. :/ I think ten years on there remains nothing even remotely comparable to Sandstorm for a dozen reasons, but I also can't assure you an issue you find would get fixed expediently, for sure.
germandiago 1y ago
Hello everyone. I have been using Sandstorm and put it to good use in the last few years. I used it with Wekan for project management and I also run Dokuwiki for self-hosted docs. It has been zero maintenance for me so it has been great. However, the packages ecosystem seems unmaintained. It is a pitty because I think the tool has a ton of potential and I really liked it. I am considering moving to Yunohost or something similar but right now my little server hosts, together with other services, Sandstorm and I think Yunohost needs to monopolize the server. So I would ask for recommendations on similar tools. Not bare Docker containers but fully lanaged platforms wirh one click installs where it is easy to add/remove users.
- diggan 1y ago
  > So I would ask for recommendations on similar tools. Not bare Docker containers but fully lanaged platforms wirh one click installs where it is easy to add/remove users. I've done a similar journey for my self-hosted stuff, started with Sandstorm, moved to Yunohost, but got frustrated with the configuration, and how different every package was and eventually have landed on using NixOS for my home servers. It's not a "fully managed platform" in the traditional sense, but if you're a developer, that's almost what you get. Adding new services is usually just adding the configuration for them. Bit of a learning curve learning the language, tooling and ecosystem, but once you're over that hurdle, having all declerative configuration in SCM together with easy linking of configuration options together (define service ports once, reference them in other services, for example), and everything being easy to rollback, have been a god-send so far. Been running it for maybe 2 years or something by now, with more or less zero issues besides the ones I introduce myself. Adding/removing users can be as easy as adding/remove one line of configuration, and redeploying. Simple enough for me and my family so far.
- ethan_smith 1y ago
  For Sandstorm alternatives with one-click installs and user management, consider Cloudron, Caprover, Umbrel, Unraid, TrueNAS SCALE apps, or Portainer with its app templates - most allow running alongside other services without monopolizing your server.
raphinou 1y ago
I was initially enthousiastic about sandstorm when I encountered it, but in the end my preferred solution for self hosting has been Docker Swarm. Dead simple setup, low maintenance, everything easily deployable within Swarm (crons, backups, first deployment setup, reverse proxy config incl. certificates, etc). Additionally a lot of projects provide a Docker compose file which is mostly compatible with swarm. I started using Swarm [1] when k8s was already ruling, but never regretted my choice. 1: https://www.yvesdennels.com/posts/docker-swarm-in-2022/ https://www.yvesdennels.com/posts/docker-swarm-in-2022/
- BretFisher 1y ago
  Yes! Docker Swarm is still being supported in 2025, and we have community and solution resources in an Awesome List https://github.com/BretFisher/awesome-swarm https://github.com/BretFisher/awesome-swarm
bhasinanant 1y ago
What I do want to understand is, why would anyone use this instead of NextCloud, for example. I'm all for having local setups though, as a general policy. It's just that from what I know, the difference in feature sets is just too huge right now.
- Gigachad 1y ago
  Sandstorm was like an App Store for any server app. You could install nextcloud with it. Was a pretty good idea but there wasn’t any sustainable business model/funding and it was also pre docker era which would have made things more secure/containerised and easier to maintain.
  - ocdtrekkie 1y ago
    You could not install Nextcloud on Sandstorm. Sandstorm has an app that used to work with Nextcloud's mobile app, but Nextcloud makes a very poor Sandstorm app because it is a monolith, instead of being granular. (Personally I also find Nextcloud incredibly sluggish, but it is quite popular so it must work better for others.)
esafak 1y ago
Smaller cats, bigger screenshots, please.
c-hendricks 1y ago
I remember Sandstorm but don't remember it ever billing itself as a web productivity suite... It was a repository of self-hostable apps with their own auth layer integrated so managing users and permissions was easier. This always sounded like a monumental task. I've since gone with Authelia.
- ocdtrekkie 1y ago
  I think this particular marketing choice was at the time intended to pursue enterprise users. It's been there since before the original startup shut down.
kentonv 1y ago
sandstorm.org is an offshoot of sandstorm.io, my old (failed) startup. Some folks who really wanted to keep the project running took over ownership of the open source code. I'm not involved these days. Full story at: https://sandstorm.io/news/2024-01-14-move-to-sandstorm-org https://sandstorm.io/news/2024-01-14-move-to-sandstorm-org The people still trying to run it are good people, so I hate to say this, but... it doesn't seem like they are going to make progress. There hasn't been a new release in years, and the codebase is rotting. I wouldn't recommend running it in its current state. Meanwhile, though, I feel like the advent of vibe coding has made Sandstorm's approach seem newly relevant. Sandstorm's architecture made "novice" code safe to run even for users with sensitive security needs. Well well well, suddenly we have a whole lot more novice code than we used to. Is it... time for me to take another pass at this?
- unixhero 1y ago
  I could have definitely used it in my company nowadays, as a paying org. A refresh of available apps would maybe be necessary now. Sandstorm was so awesome.
- creativeSlumber 1y ago
  > Is it... time for me to take another pass at this? Yes please. I was very excited for Sandstorm when it first started. Sad to see it's current stage. Also I think the world around has evolved quite a bit wrt containerization from when Sandstorm first started. I wonder how you would build it today, if you were to build from scratch. Could you utilize docker for most of the containerization?
  - kentonv 1y ago
    I think if I were doing it again I would not use containers at all. Instead I'd use isolates -- like Cloudflare Workers. In fact I'd probably build in on workerd (open source Cloudflare Workers runtime). I'm obviously a bit biased here, as the architect of Cloudflare Workers. But, I think it's a much better fit for Sandstorm than containers were. Sandstorm suffered from some really bad cold start times, especially with every "grain" (e.g. document) running in its own container. It also led to a lot of other inefficiencies. The down side of this is of course that it'd be much harder to port existing apps to the platform (unless maybe if they were already written to target Workers). But I think: * Sandstorm didn't support existing apps very well anyway. It took a lot of work to convert apps for Sandstorm's security model. Many of the best Sandstorm apps were written from scratch for Sandstorm -- which incidentally was a lot easier than writing a traditional app, because Sandstorm took care of a lot of the work for you. * AI-assisted coding takes a lot of the pressure off to support existing apps, because it'll be that much easier to build new ones. A Sandstorm-like environment would be a great fit for vibe coding since it takes care of so much of the boilerplate and enforces security in a way that the app can't screw it up. What do you think? Would this ruin it for you?

183 points by nalinidash 1y ago

I looked into Sandstorm when I moved away from NethServer; I'm a strong believer in self-hosting. Sandstorm was too haphazard with apps and security of apps didn't seem to be their highest priority. I went with Cloudron, it's a nice mix of good app selection and security.

wisty 1y ago
Security was their highest priority. IIRC idea was that all security was done by sharing links (with capabilities) to documents.
ferfumarma 1y ago
The entire security model of sandstorm is incredibly strong. This criticism is hard to understand. Can you elaborate at all? Do you recall any specific issues?
- jerf 1y ago
  The problem with the strong security is that it makes it expensive to port into the system. They also assumed more sharing than people actually seem interested in. I'm mostly just running apps that have no reason to share with each other because they each have their own domain anyhow. So the end result is the ecosystem was more expensive to join if you had an existing system than it might have been otherwise, and it inhibited getting projects onboarded. I am not the craziest self-hoster, but I've got several things now. I run a core syncthing node, Immich, Jellyfin, and Pihole. (Honorable mention I suppose to a Vaultwarden image, which is run on the public internet but my scripts treat it like it's another self-hosted option, rsync'ing it down locally and including it in the daily backup.) None of those are on Sandstorm, and a major reason why is the security system. They don't match it and porting it is a rather large amount of effort. I haven't used any of the self-hosting options, so I can't review if any of them are as nice as Sandstorm. All of the above is running in Docker on an Ubuntu N150 and a USB hard drive, home-grown, with a backup script (restic over S3, true backup) that covers them all. It ought to in principle do most of what Sandstorm does now by driving docker, albeit missing the sharing, which I can't say looked all that compelling anyhow, automatic backup integration, etc., because it really isn't all that hard to set up.

oulipo 1y ago

Cool, what would be the differences with a tool like https://dokploy.com/ https://dokploy.com/ ?

mkl 1y ago
That seems to be totally different. Sandstorm was a way of building your own private ~equivalent of Google Workspace out of existing open source web apps running in containers behind a common auth system.

meindnoch 1y ago

This still exists? Is anyone using it? What's the use case?

neuroelectron 1y ago
Imagine iCloud but you can manage more than 1,000 files at once, the files transfer much more quickly and don't have to use a touch interface that flakes out, plus no rent.

AceJohnny2 1y ago

Oh Sandstorm, what could've been... Taking from https://sandstorm.org/about https://sandstorm.org/about > Kenton Varda [NB: kentonv around here] launched Sandstorm in 2014 via an Indiegogo campaign, before co-founding Sandstorm Development Group with Jade Wang to develop Sandstorm as both a Software-as-a-Service [...] > In early 2017, Sandstorm Development Group ran out of funding and the team primarily joined Cloudflare. [NB: Where kentonv works to this day, leading the Cloud Workers team. Arguably related?] [...] > In 2020, a group of Sandstorm enthusiasts began a community effort to revive development of Sandstorm. [...] As of 2022, Sandstorm Development Group has been completely dissolved, and development of the Sandstorm project has transitioned to a community-run model. kentonv actually posted a recap of the history, including the tragic passing of Ian "zenhack" Denhart who was leading the community effort https://sandstorm.io/news/2024-01-14-move-to-sandstorm-org https://sandstorm.io/news/2024-01-14-move-to-sandstorm-org

swah 1y ago
What could have been? I remember being so excited about this at that point, I was sure it was going to take a significant chunk of [famous web services still around]. They even send me stickers for Cap'n'proto..
- aesh2Xa1 1y ago
  If I understood it well enough, the intention was to formalize/standardize self-hosting such that it became easier (and with an emphasis on security). With that done well, perhaps the next step would have been ready-made images. I could see it reducing friction for people if they'd rent a VPS, upload an ISO/IMG, and the resulting system was reliably secure. Then they'd use the Sandstorm interface to install apps with a web GUI. There is still a roadmap documented here: https://github.com/sandstorm-io/sandstorm/tree/master/roadmap/self-hosting https://github.com/sandstorm-io/sandstorm/tree/master/roadma...

MissTake 1y ago

Is it just me, or is Sandstorm just not maintained any more? The most recent closed issues were self closed rather than as the result of development, while meanwhile the open issues continue to pile up with virtually no code changes made to the tree… It’s a shame because it seems like it could have been a thing. Sadly though it’s hard to justify time investment into a platform like this if you know there’s little to no chance of getting any issues fixed.

crabmusket 1y ago
There is a small community maintaining it - there should be a link to the Zulip on the website - but it is a small group and a complex beast. Some effort is going into a rewrite that keeps the same app/security model, but moves from C++ to Go and simplifies the database layer. I believe that's taking up a fair bit of contributor energy.
benatkin 1y ago
They didn’t quite reach the MVP level and so in a way it wasn’t really maintained in the early days either.
- crabmusket 1y ago
  I don't know about that, I happily use it to host a couple of Wekan and Dokuwiki instances, and some random Etherpad docs. It's certainly MVP-complete. And even in its current state, it has some fantastic affordances that I don't feel I could get anywhere else. For example, I had an instance running on my laptop to fiddle around with developing apps. I wanted to take a Dokuwiki on my laptop and move it to my cloud-hosted instance. I clicked "download backup" of the grain, which gave me a zip file which was whatever, 40MB or something, and then I went into my cloud setup, clicked "import from backup", and voila - my entire Dokuwiki grain was now in the cloud.
ocdtrekkie 1y ago
There is a small community working on it (hi!) but there is several hard problems in the way of moving forward, all of which can be solved with time and money, neither of which we have a lot of. :/ I think ten years on there remains nothing even remotely comparable to Sandstorm for a dozen reasons, but I also can't assure you an issue you find would get fixed expediently, for sure.

germandiago 1y ago

Hello everyone. I have been using Sandstorm and put it to good use in the last few years. I used it with Wekan for project management and I also run Dokuwiki for self-hosted docs. It has been zero maintenance for me so it has been great. However, the packages ecosystem seems unmaintained. It is a pitty because I think the tool has a ton of potential and I really liked it. I am considering moving to Yunohost or something similar but right now my little server hosts, together with other services, Sandstorm and I think Yunohost needs to monopolize the server. So I would ask for recommendations on similar tools. Not bare Docker containers but fully lanaged platforms wirh one click installs where it is easy to add/remove users.

diggan 1y ago
> So I would ask for recommendations on similar tools. Not bare Docker containers but fully lanaged platforms wirh one click installs where it is easy to add/remove users. I've done a similar journey for my self-hosted stuff, started with Sandstorm, moved to Yunohost, but got frustrated with the configuration, and how different every package was and eventually have landed on using NixOS for my home servers. It's not a "fully managed platform" in the traditional sense, but if you're a developer, that's almost what you get. Adding new services is usually just adding the configuration for them. Bit of a learning curve learning the language, tooling and ecosystem, but once you're over that hurdle, having all declerative configuration in SCM together with easy linking of configuration options together (define service ports once, reference them in other services, for example), and everything being easy to rollback, have been a god-send so far. Been running it for maybe 2 years or something by now, with more or less zero issues besides the ones I introduce myself. Adding/removing users can be as easy as adding/remove one line of configuration, and redeploying. Simple enough for me and my family so far.
ethan_smith 1y ago
For Sandstorm alternatives with one-click installs and user management, consider Cloudron, Caprover, Umbrel, Unraid, TrueNAS SCALE apps, or Portainer with its app templates - most allow running alongside other services without monopolizing your server.

raphinou 1y ago

I was initially enthousiastic about sandstorm when I encountered it, but in the end my preferred solution for self hosting has been Docker Swarm. Dead simple setup, low maintenance, everything easily deployable within Swarm (crons, backups, first deployment setup, reverse proxy config incl. certificates, etc). Additionally a lot of projects provide a Docker compose file which is mostly compatible with swarm. I started using Swarm [1] when k8s was already ruling, but never regretted my choice. 1: https://www.yvesdennels.com/posts/docker-swarm-in-2022/ https://www.yvesdennels.com/posts/docker-swarm-in-2022/

BretFisher 1y ago
Yes! Docker Swarm is still being supported in 2025, and we have community and solution resources in an Awesome List https://github.com/BretFisher/awesome-swarm https://github.com/BretFisher/awesome-swarm

bhasinanant 1y ago

What I do want to understand is, why would anyone use this instead of NextCloud, for example. I'm all for having local setups though, as a general policy. It's just that from what I know, the difference in feature sets is just too huge right now.

Gigachad 1y ago
Sandstorm was like an App Store for any server app. You could install nextcloud with it. Was a pretty good idea but there wasn’t any sustainable business model/funding and it was also pre docker era which would have made things more secure/containerised and easier to maintain.
- ocdtrekkie 1y ago
  You could not install Nextcloud on Sandstorm. Sandstorm has an app that used to work with Nextcloud's mobile app, but Nextcloud makes a very poor Sandstorm app because it is a monolith, instead of being granular. (Personally I also find Nextcloud incredibly sluggish, but it is quite popular so it must work better for others.)

esafak 1y ago

Smaller cats, bigger screenshots, please.

c-hendricks 1y ago

I remember Sandstorm but don't remember it ever billing itself as a web productivity suite... It was a repository of self-hostable apps with their own auth layer integrated so managing users and permissions was easier. This always sounded like a monumental task. I've since gone with Authelia.

ocdtrekkie 1y ago
I think this particular marketing choice was at the time intended to pursue enterprise users. It's been there since before the original startup shut down.

kentonv 1y ago

sandstorm.org is an offshoot of sandstorm.io, my old (failed) startup. Some folks who really wanted to keep the project running took over ownership of the open source code. I'm not involved these days. Full story at: https://sandstorm.io/news/2024-01-14-move-to-sandstorm-org https://sandstorm.io/news/2024-01-14-move-to-sandstorm-org The people still trying to run it are good people, so I hate to say this, but... it doesn't seem like they are going to make progress. There hasn't been a new release in years, and the codebase is rotting. I wouldn't recommend running it in its current state. Meanwhile, though, I feel like the advent of vibe coding has made Sandstorm's approach seem newly relevant. Sandstorm's architecture made "novice" code safe to run even for users with sensitive security needs. Well well well, suddenly we have a whole lot more novice code than we used to. Is it... time for me to take another pass at this?

unixhero 1y ago
I could have definitely used it in my company nowadays, as a paying org. A refresh of available apps would maybe be necessary now. Sandstorm was so awesome.
creativeSlumber 1y ago
> Is it... time for me to take another pass at this? Yes please. I was very excited for Sandstorm when it first started. Sad to see it's current stage. Also I think the world around has evolved quite a bit wrt containerization from when Sandstorm first started. I wonder how you would build it today, if you were to build from scratch. Could you utilize docker for most of the containerization?
- kentonv 1y ago
  I think if I were doing it again I would not use containers at all. Instead I'd use isolates -- like Cloudflare Workers. In fact I'd probably build in on workerd (open source Cloudflare Workers runtime). I'm obviously a bit biased here, as the architect of Cloudflare Workers. But, I think it's a much better fit for Sandstorm than containers were. Sandstorm suffered from some really bad cold start times, especially with every "grain" (e.g. document) running in its own container. It also led to a lot of other inefficiencies. The down side of this is of course that it'd be much harder to port existing apps to the platform (unless maybe if they were already written to target Workers). But I think: * Sandstorm didn't support existing apps very well anyway. It took a lot of work to convert apps for Sandstorm's security model. Many of the best Sandstorm apps were written from scratch for Sandstorm -- which incidentally was a lot easier than writing a traditional app, because Sandstorm took care of a lot of the work for you. * AI-assisted coding takes a lot of the pressure off to support existing apps, because it'll be that much easier to build new ones. A Sandstorm-like environment would be a great fit for vibe coding since it takes care of so much of the boilerplate and enforces security in a way that the app can't screw it up. What do you think? Would this ruin it for you?