14 ms·

Sandstorm – An open source platform for personal servers

509 points by reinhardt1053 12y ago

jorjordandan 12y ago
The web site says apps cant perform psych experiments, and links to the contentious facebook emotion split test. I'm pretty sure you'll be able to do split testing on these apps... That small criticism aside, I'm very curious how developing for sandstorm would be different from from developing for a typical host. Anyone know the major differences?
- swsieber 12y ago
  One major thing that I can think of off the top of my head is that they provide the login and authentication for you and you just plug into it. They also have a sharing system in place that I think you can easily plug into.
- pmontra 12y ago
  I see that many old and new web applications run inside sandstorm, so it's a framework to manage apps. They probably have to be adapted a little but I don't think that WordPress has been rewritten to fit into sandstorm. Anything will do, probably. Furthermore you can download sandstorm and install it on your server.
  - deleted 12y ago
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- rdrey 12y ago
  Sure, you could write an app that does A/B testing, but the whole idea is that people will use Sandstorm to run _personal_ servers/apps. And A/B testing your own reaction to an app doesn't make much sense. Runtime permissions of these apps will be easy to control, so the Sandstorm platform will prevent apps from phoning home without your permission.
  - jorjordandan 12y ago
    Again thanks! But using Facebook was still a poorly chosen example of what their apps won't do, since they aren't aiming for hosting large customer facing apps like a social network. Perhaps that is what contributed to my confusion in the first place. Now I have a better understanding of what it's for.
  - swsieber 12y ago
    Ah, but you could write an A/B testing page and then share it easily with your friends - part of the value proposition is 1) hosting your personal apps and 2) fine-grained sharing of it with others. So it wouldn't be a huge sampling, just your friends.
- kentonv 12y ago
  Once our sandbox is complete, apps will not be able to "phone home" unless the user grants permission, so users will need to opt into any experiments. Currently there are two reasons this isn't true yet: * We haven't implemented client-side sandboxing yet. It's not incredibly hard (content-security-policy header, some tweaking of apps), but hasn't hit the top of the priority queue. * The server sandbox currently has some intentionally-poked holes allowing apps to do things like pull RSS feeds from the internet. We plan to close these once the Powerbox UI is implemented, which is the main permission-granting interface, but that's a major project and we wanted to get some useful apps working in the meantime.
  - tomjen3 12y ago
    Couldn't you do an AB test by having the code choose a random number on install (or first write to the datastore) and have it leak the results by loading an image or iframe with a special url/query parameter?
    - kentonv 12y ago
      With Content-Security-Policy we can prohibit an app from using images or other assets from third-party servers.
MayanAstronaut 12y ago
Looks great but memory usage is ambiguous. What if I load a data structure to over the 1gb allocation? If I need to load a 1.2gb dictionary the whole thing topple?
- kentonv 12y ago
  There is no 1GB limit. I think you might be confused about compute units? Compute units are just a measure of RAM usage over time -- a compute unit is 1GB of RAM used for one hour. An app can use more than 1GB of RAM; it will just consume compute units faster. E.g. an app using 2GB will consume a compute unit in 30 minutes. This all relates to our upcoming managed hosting. Self-hosted installs are not metered since it's your own hardware. https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2015-01-14-compute-units.html https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2015-01-14-compute-units.html
jorjordandan 12y ago
Would a sandstorm app prevent you from using say, Google analytics or new relic without getting a users permission?
- rdrey 12y ago
  I don't think Sandstorm wants to be a platform on which you host your large user-facing app. Instead it wants to be the platform on which you can install your personal wiki, ipython notebooks, your streaming media library, etc. You as the owner of the Sandstorm instance will control whether the apps on your instance can send data to Google for Google Analytics, for example. If you invite someone else to use an app on your Sandstorm instance, they will trust _you_ with their data and you can decide whether the apps on your instance share the data with Google or not.
  - jorjordandan 12y ago
    Ah, that makes much more sense now! I think they need to figure out a better way to spell out their value proposition.
SimplyUseless 12y ago
On their github page, it still shows a warning about not using it for mission critical applications. https://github.com/sandstorm-io/sandstorm https://github.com/sandstorm-io/sandstorm
- ocdtrekkie 12y ago
  Well, it's kinda an Alpha. Goes without saying, doesn't it?
rdtsc 12y ago
Btw the main developer, Kenton Varda, is also the author of Cap-n-Proto -- a pretty neat serialization & RPC format. https://capnproto.org/ https://capnproto.org/ I was playing with that and stumbled on Sandstorm a while back.
- swah 12y ago
  He likes LAN parties: http://kentonsprojects.blogspot.com/2011/12/lan-party-optimized-house.html http://kentonsprojects.blogspot.com/2011/12/lan-party-optimi...
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - vtempest 12y ago
    I was there! Small world. I would definitely use sandstorm if I wasn't an IT guy.
- green7ea 12y ago
  Cap-n-Proto is awesome in so many ways. I'm trying sandstorm just for that.
polynomial 12y ago
This looks incredibly useful for things we're currently trying to make Docker do. Huge potential here.
- S4M 12y ago
  Can you give examples?
- qiqing 12y ago
  Hey polynomial, I'd love to learn more about your use case. Drop me a line at jade at sandstorm?
3zzy 12y ago
As a designer, the website gave me an 'aha- moment, nicely done! :)
ozh 12y ago
Sounds cool but I think the WordPress implementation is TERRIBLE: it depends on a WordPress fork that is completely outdated, instead of downloading an up-to-date fresh archive.
- paulproteus 12y ago
  I agree -- the current WordPress package needs work. Thank you for trying it and looking into it! Community-wise, one thing we're going to need, as Sandstorm grows, is an ecosystem of app package maintainers. Part of what we're hoping is that more developers of the apps themselves will maintain the Sandstorm ports, like Audrey Tang is maintaining the EtherCalc port. Tech-wise, one thing we're going to need is a solid story for how Sandstorm packages will easily stay up to date with the latest changes as the upstream author releases new updates. I work on+for Sandstorm, and I'm also a Debian developer. Debian is not a shining example with regard to either of the above, and I'm sure we can do even better at Sandstorm.
  - tokenizerrr 12y ago
    Is it possible to run arbitrary Docker containers? If so, that could be a solution.
    - paulproteus 12y ago
      It's not currently possible to run arbitrary Docker containers through Sandstorm, since we prefer app packages (we call them SPKs) to be: * Self-contained -- if the app needs MySQL, bundle it; * Able to run with external network access unavailable -- this improves security, since even if an app gets compromised, it's not a big deal since it can't leak any data out to the world; and a few other constraints that are more technical than philosophical. https://github.com/sandstorm-io/sandstorm/wiki/Porting-Guide https://github.com/sandstorm-io/sandstorm/wiki/Porting-Guide hints at them, but I don't quickly find a reference for all these constraints. I'm likely to write such a reference in the next few days/weeks, though.
      - 12y ago
leonardinius 12y ago
It's the case of me scrolling the site and reading most of the GH readme - and still getting almost no idea what status it is, what is the goal/vision and how I might use it.. "We do LXC stuff in secure and user friendly way" is the message?
- paulproteus 12y ago
  Here's my own summary, which if you like it, I can try harder to make sure becomes more prominent somewhere: Sandstorm is a way to run web apps as containers, gloriously sandboxed from each other, and moreover a web interface to install them easily and allow the user to create multiple instances of a web app easily. It intends to grow features relating to sharing instances -- so that an instance of a web app is as easy to share with someone else as a Google Docs link -- and grow features relating to supporting more network protocols -- so that apps can safely communicate with the outside world, mediated by the person using Sandstorm. Right now, the target audience is people who like running web apps like WordPress or Ethercalc on their own server. In the future, the target audience will grow to include companies whose IT departments want to enable users to install web apps safely without asking IT first -- they'll know it's safe due to the glorious sandboxing.
  - jorjordandan 12y ago
    How is glorious sandboxing different from regular sandboxing? Is there a 'glorious' certification? Just kidding - looks pretty awesome!!
    - deleted 12y ago
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- kentonv 12y ago
  Did you get a chance to try the demo? It was pretty overloaded earlier, but is in better shape now. https://demo.sandstorm.io https://demo.sandstorm.io
amirmc 12y ago
Things like Sandstorm are really important as they allow people options without becoming a full-blown sysadmin. Just look at how many crowd funding ideas are based on 'personal cloud' concepts. However, we also need to work on the fundamental problems to make it easier to build decentralised products in the first place (not everything is a web-app). Namely, how such apps are built, how they store/sync data, and how we deal with identity. The current tools simply aren't designed for the world we're heading towards, so we need to re-evaluate our assumptions. On top of this is the need for business models that don't rely on mass data collection (eg advertising) -- we can't rely on everything being open source but the underlying infrastructure must be. There are many ways forward and the particular approach I'm taking is based on unikernels and creating a modern stack to deal with the above issues directly. There's more info at http://amirchaudhry.com/brewing-miso-to-serve-nymote/ http://amirchaudhry.com/brewing-miso-to-serve-nymote/ If anyone happens to be at FOSDEM this weekend I'd be happy to chat about these ideas in person.
- jackweirdy 12y ago
  Will you be talking about Mirage/other bits of your work at FOSDEM, or are you “just” attending?
  - amirmc 12y ago
    Not speaking but doing a demo at the Xen booth on Saturday (likely 1pm-3pm but email me to be sure). The repo has details about the demo if you're interested (though it's probably also a spoiler) https://github.com/amirmc/fosdemo https://github.com/amirmc/fosdemo
- paulproteus 12y ago
  I'm at FOSDEM! I'm on #fosdem and #sandstorm on freenode -- my nick is paulproteus. Also I work on+for Sandstorm.
- mempko 12y ago
  I love the idea of unikernels! I took a much high level approach for p2p apps with Fire★ (http://firestr.com http://firestr.com). Where it is GUI centric and has a built in app editor (all application code is viewable/editable). My only concern with the unikernel approach is that you can end up with a system where the code is not viewable and editable. Have you thought about that concern?
dominotw 12y ago
The logo is very cute. I love it.
- qiqing 12y ago
  Thanks! h/t to Néna Nguyễn :)
idiotclock 12y ago
Would this also work for a GNU Social or pump.io service? Or diaspora?
- ocdtrekkie 12y ago
  One of the Sandstorm devs is already working on porting Diaspora. pump.io has been mentioned as a possible thing to port.
CalRobert 12y ago
This is exactly what needs to exist. I recently set up Ghost, Owncloud, and Gitlab on a personal server (odroid U3) that sits under my couch at home, and it's really rewarding to own the hardware which is my "cloud". However, it should be easier, and possible for anyone. Good for you guys.
- maninalift 12y ago
  ghost what?
  - iamdave 12y ago
    http://ghost.org http://ghost.org - it's a markdown based blog engine that gets out of your way and lets you focus on writing. I run it for my blog and love it. There are a few features that I'd really like to have, but I get around them by editing locally.
  - ocdtrekkie 12y ago
    Ghost is a blogging platform! https://ghost.org/ https://ghost.org/
  - teh_klev 12y ago
    This probably: https://ghost.org/ https://ghost.org/
  - CalRobert 12y ago
    Below commenters are correct - the blog platform.
  - e12e 12y ago
    Incidentally, running containers is probably a great way to "install" the ghost libc vulnerability[1] (assuming you're basing off of base-images made before the bug was patched, and you haven't updated your containers/images). I'm not sure neither vagrant nor docker have this really fixed -- that is: easily patching the base system/image (and still be confident that the app keeps running). Is there an easy way to update a container based off of a (possibly few generations remote) base-image? Eg: You've pulled down a bare-bones, official CoreOS/Ubuntu/Debian/RedHat image from docker -- set it up for your use-case (say made a base image with your own CA-cert bundled, wired it up for kerberos/ldap/AD, maybe set up a trusted ssh-server ca-cert) -- then made a handful of images based off that: db, cache, and web-app. Is there an easy way to patch the base image and all descendants? I assume all state should be in other volumes, so maybe this is easier than I think? At any rate, it is something to keep in mind -- that grabbing images are great, but updates are still needed! As other mention, the ghost refereed to by gp, is a blogging platform. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8953545 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8953545
sarciszewski 12y ago
> Contributors: Jasvir Nagra <img src=x onerror=alert()> Nice try :)
- kentonv 12y ago
  I love that Jas (being on the Google security team) just instinctively XSS's any form he fills out, and I love that our code just leaves his tag there, properly escaped, for all to see.
debacle 12y ago
I don't understand what this is. Can someone explain? What the hell does "This is the only way to make Open Source web apps viable." mean?
- ocdtrekkie 12y ago
  The primary idea being that open source web apps can be used without having to be a server admin. Non-technical users can install apps on a Sandstorm server as easily as installing apps on their phone.
  - cben 12y ago
    More details: https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2014-07-21-open-source-web-apps-require-federated-hosting.html https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2014-07-21-open-source-web-ap... The central point (IMO) was economical: self-hosting frees developer from expenses. Trivial installation is just a pre-requisite for self-hosting to be acceptable.
mmccaff 12y ago
The web page is beautiful. It might help to emphasize where this sits between installing Docker images from the repo, and using something like Webuzo or Softaculous to install popular web apps.
j_s 12y ago
The easiest way to get your own LibreBoard while they straighten out their DMCA from Trello! :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8936701 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8936701
daemonk 12y ago
Is this like a cloud docker?
- qiqing 12y ago
  We use the same Linux kernel features that Docker uses, but we use them directly. Here's a deeper explanation: https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2014-08-19-why-not-run-docker-apps.html https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2014-08-19-why-not-run-docker...
iamwil 12y ago
How do you get individually installed apps to selectively share data with other installations? I imagine something like diaspora tried solving this problem. Is there a general solution for any app?
- kentonv 12y ago
  This is something we're still building (Sandstorm is still in alpha), but what we have in mind we call the Powerbox. The idea is that one app can say to the system "I implement such and such protocol at such and such endpoint". Later on, some other app can say "I need something implementing such and such protocol". The system itself displays a picker, showing the user all of their other apps that may satisfy the requirement. When the user makes a choice, the requesting app is told how to contact the providing app and is implicitly given permission to do so, whereas prior to the exchange the apps had no ability to talk to each other. The user can inspect these connections later and potentially revoke them. This is a whole lot easier for the user than going to the providing app and editing an ACL, then going to the requesting app and giving it an endpoint address, etc. The way this is implemented under the hood is in terms of Cap'n Proto capability-based RPC. Blog post on that: https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2014-12-15-capnproto-0.5.html https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2014-12-15-capnproto-0.5.html
  - iamwil 12y ago
    That's pretty neat it's like the android intent system. How does the system get the list of all other apps that satisfy the requirement? I'm guessing all apps register with sandstorm server somewhere that has a centralized list of other servers? It'd be neat to have standard protocols, in the same way we have standard media types.
    - kentonv 12y ago
      The system knows about other apps installed on your server, but not necessarily apps on other servers. To connect to something on another server you will usually want to obtain a Cap'n Proto capability to it. You might do this through, say, a messaging app that has the ability to embed capabilities. Your friend sends you a message with a capability to some object on their server, and then your messaging app publishes that capability on the receiving server, such that it will now appear in the powerbox for other apps on that server. Alternatively (less cool, but more practical), you might just drop a URL into the Powerbox and Sandstorm will connect to it and turn it into a capability.
falcolas 12y ago
I'm a DevOps developer, so keep that in mind as you read below. Sandstorm looks insecure and inefficient, but that probably won't matter. The ease of use for the end user trumps all. Users will love this, but I'm not looking forwarding to having to administer boxes running Sandstorm, though. I imagine there will be a fair bit of work from my end to re-building apps so they can take advantage of tuned settings, shared services, caches, and the like. Plus figuring out a way to automate the usual securing, managing, monitoring, and cleanup around the Sandstorm environment. Identifying bottlenecks will be fun too, though my first instinct will probably be to look at the Cap'n'Protocol bridge which Sandstorm runs everything through.
- jerf 12y ago
  "Sandstorm looks insecure and inefficient, but that probably won't matter." You may need to expand on that. It is not clear that you know what they're doing with sandboxing, etc. If you are, then I'm definitely interested in your further criticism, if this was a knee-jerk response I think it's unjustified. "I imagine there will be a fair bit of work from my end to re-building apps so they can take advantage of tuned settings, shared services, caches, and the like." Are you building apps that you expect people to deploy to their personal servers on a routine basis? For normal DevOps folks working inside of a corporation, Sandstorm is a complete non-event. It's not targeted at any part of your pipeline. The fact you're asking about bottlenecks makes me wonder a bit if you understand where this is targeted, too; frankly Sandstorm could slow everything it runs down by a factor of 10 and I wouldn't notice. My VPS that I would run sandstorm on is 99.9% idle anyhow, if not 99.99%.
  - falcolas 12y ago
    I addressed the security concern in a response to kentonv, please feel free to comment more on that one. > Sandstorm is a complete non-event. I am speaking from the point of view of someone who may be asked to run and manage Sandstorm servers. Either as a service to sell, or as a service for internal customers. This is a very different use case than using it for just myself. And if I'm honest, this isn't something I'd need to or want to run for myself. I'm comfortable with managing shared services and propping up web frontends. So no, I am not the targeted user of this software; however, I am the one who gets to write tools and processes to support those targeted users at some point in the future.
themoonbus 12y ago
Here is how to write a landing page. Big letters: "Sandstorm makes it easier to do XYZ" or "Sandstorm lets you do XYZ by doing XYZ" E.g. "Sandstorm lets you run your own personal web applications without needing a background in IT!" or "Sandstorm lets you to install personal web apps as easily as you install mobile apps!" 3 examples of what this could actually mean for 80% of your users "Run your own Dropbox!" "Host your own WordPress Blog!" "Get a mailbox to match your personalized email address!" THEN drill down into what it actually is (Sandstorm is a open source platform that makes it easier to run and manage your own personal server, yadda yadda), and its more specific features, such as usability, security, etc. (This advice operates under the assumption that "individuals" are your main target audience.)
- qiqing 12y ago
  Thanks for your feedback!
- larrybud 12y ago
  +1 I went to Sandstorm's home page, and spent the first 5 minutes trying to figure out what it is & what it does. "Sandstorm is an open source platform for personal servers". Ok, fine, but what is it REALLY? What does it do? Why is it better than (hosting / VPS hosting / AWS / Docker / PaaS)? Give me some examples of what I can do with it. Sorry, you lost me with your home page.
  - roadnottaken 12y ago
    I had the same experience. Still don't get it.
    - kentonv 12y ago
      Question: Did either of you try the demo? (I know it was kind of broken under all the traffic earlier.) Usually the demo is what makes people "get it". It's been surprisingly difficult to find a sentence or two that describe Sandstorm in a way that is effective on everyone. For any text we use, different sets of people get it or are confused. :/
api 12y ago
I've been following this for a while and really like it. Have yet to try an install but probably will once it's more mature. Dumb question: why not build on and leverage Docker? I'm sure you have an answer. I'm just curious.
- kentonv 12y ago
  Indeed, we have a whole blog post about that. :) https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2014-08-19-why-not-run-docker-apps.html https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2014-08-19-why-not-run-docker...
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
kornakiewicz 12y ago
What's make me curious - do you plan enable option for selling apps? As a developer I would be more than happy to allow user install my app, but since I am not charity I would like to earn some money on it as well.
- kentonv 12y ago
  Yes, we'll have an app store much like iPhone/Android. Open source apps will have the option of using a "pay what you want" model, but we'll also allow proprietary apps with fixed prices and maybe even subscription-based.
  - kornakiewicz 12y ago
    Great to read. Fingers crossed for the project.
bovermyer 12y ago
This is actually pretty fantastic. I loved how quickly I could get an app up and running. I assume that the paid version has a better app search/browse experience? The demo list, while cool, was pretty long and uncategorized.
- kentonv 12y ago
  Yeah the demo "app list" is just a placeholder. We're working on an "app store" with self-service uploads, searchability, paid apps, pay-what-you-want for open source apps, etc. Once it is ready it will be available to everyone, whether you use self-hosting or managed.
  - bovermyer 12y ago
    I appreciate this very, very much. You have my attention.
tomc1985 12y ago
Enough with the cute! We're developers, not a gaggle of teenage girls!
alinspired 12y ago
on the first glance it's similar cpanel or plesk, but opensource, will take a look!
seagreen 12y ago
Does anybody have any thoughts on the differences between Sandstorm, Camlistore, and Tent? It seems there are a number of problems here. We need: 1. Better data stores 2. Better server environments 3. Better ways to share data with others I wonder if Camlistore's approach might not be the cleanest, since it doesn't try to bundle (1) and (2) together. EDIT: Not to get too sappy, but any of these would be _fantastic_ compared to our current Web 2.0 disaster, and I'm glad Sandstorm is picking up steam.
- kentonv 12y ago
  Camlistore and Tent are both complimentary to Sandstorm. Sandstorm gives you a way to run apps easily, Camlistore is a structured storage system which other apps could connect to, and Tent is a federation protocol that apps could use to talk to each other. I'd like to see this all converge at some point. :)
  - seagreen 12y ago
    That's awesome news. I'm suspicious there's too much overlap between Camlistore and Tent for them to both be useful, since they each do data storage and sharing, but that's not your problem:)
alfg 12y ago
Very cool project. I've played around with this same idea, but as a CLI package manager, rather than a webapp. I think it would be cool to have custom VPS image, where you can install webapps to it from the CLI out of the box easily. Sort of like homebrew, but for your personal servers. Congrats!
gregimba 12y ago
This isn't really anything to write home about.
69_years_and 12y ago
Sandstorm - this is wickedly cool, tried the demo and it worked great, can't understand all the 'do this, do that' comments. As someone who is just learning to play with docker - just finished dockerizing all my vps apps so the first thing I think of is there a Dockerfile to build this or a docker image - off to have a look for one. Awesome stuff - like the collection of apps you have ready to go. Maybe you have fixed the landing web page in the meantime but I had no trouble understanding what you are about. 100.times upvote.
- kentonv 12y ago
  Thanks!
davidjgraph 12y ago
There's a lot of focus of how sandstorm allows you to run web applications easily without having to setup the back-end that they need without SS. There is an additional edge case, that's of web applications that don't have a back-end at all, ours falls into that category. Our web app is a by-product of two of our commercial products, but we don't actually have user management, storage, etc. Online we integrate with Google Drive and Dropbox, but you can't create an account with us and store your data with us. Sandstorm allow people to deploy our web app, whereas you can't at all, previously. It saves us months of work creating and maintaining the functionality it provides.
e12e 12y ago
First(?) discussion on hn: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7460828 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7460828 After about a year -- how tied up is sandstorm to meteor? I confess I have issues with the our-way-or-the-highway nature of meteor (our js, our db, our app-server) -- even if I can see that it does appear to give some pretty nice benefits for rapid prototyping. I'd love to see sandstorm as a handful of small tools with various uis on top: command line, web, etc. Seems like it should be possible to do with (on the extreme end) go and and a berkley/sqlite db+file system for images?
- kentonv 12y ago
  Sandstorm's front-end UI is built on Meteor, but this doesn't affect apps -- they can be written using any stack. We have apps written in Meteor, Express, Rails, PHP, Python, C++, and Rust. Meteor is actually amazingly modular if you look under the hood. We use it in a fairly default configuration, but it's easy for me to see how I would go about using a different database or a different templating language. Those people write high-quality code. Eventually I would like to ditch Mongo and instead have Meteor speaking Cap'n Proto RPC to a Cap'n Proto database. I don't expect that I'll have much trouble getting Meteor to do this. > I'd love to see sandstorm as a handful of small tools with various uis on top: command line, web, etc. Hmm, not sure I understand what you're suggesting. Sandstorm is all about UI and running web apps, so it seems to me that a "command-line interface to Sandstorm" would really be a whole different project. :)
shric 12y ago
What's the name of the song?
- iagooar 12y ago
  I thought that too, but was afraid to post it fearing the negative votes ;)
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
cyberrodent 12y ago
From https://demo.sandstorm.io/demo https://demo.sandstorm.io/demo : "We only have one machine. It may get slow or crashy under excessive load."
- kentonv 12y ago
  And indeed, when we were #1 on HN yesterday morning with hundreds of apps running concurrently, it got a bit slow and crashy. :) But things cleared up after the traffic died down a bit. Our upcoming managed hosting service will, of course, use multiple machines with automagic scaling.
JimXugle 12y ago
There's also YunoHost, a project with similar goals. I've played around with it, but it seems to be beta quality. https://yunohost.org https://yunohost.org
Hello71 12y ago
> No protection from getting your job done: Security can often be a hassle, getting in the way of your work. Sandstorm is different. When you tell a Sandstorm app to talk to some other app, or to talk to the internet, Sandstorm sees your intent and automatically grants it access. So, you are never interrupted by a prompt asking "Do you want to allow this app to the thing you just told it to do?" And yet, the apps only get the permissions you actually wanted them to have. So... the program is psychic?
- RaleyField 12y ago
  > So... the program is psychic? No, it's just based on DOS.
jmsdnns 12y ago
I really appreciate the humor in Cap'n Proto. That makes the dev team seem like a fun group to hang with.
nodejsisbest 12y ago
Darude Sandstorm is going to conflict with this projects name a bit?
bmoresbest55 12y ago
I am not really sure why this is so exciting to everyone. I have seen a couple comments asking what this software does, explicitly. I will admit I like the idea of personal servers but I am not sure how to apply this potential amazing software to my life. Suggestions?
netsurfer912 12y ago
Darude - Sandstorm (sorry)
relaxitup 12y ago
kentonv, any chance of getting a nice extended (eg, support for more than just text; file formats like images etc as well) (or even just regular) pastebin app added to Sandstorm? Perhaps something like bepasty ( https://github.com/bepasty/bepasty-server https://github.com/bepasty/bepasty-server ) or Hosty ( https://bitbucket.org/xrstf/hosty https://bitbucket.org/xrstf/hosty ).
- ocdtrekkie 12y ago
  That sort of thing is definitely well in the scope of apps that'd be good to port to Sandstorm. There's a lot of basic apps the platform still needs. Bepasty in particular sounds like a really neat potential app that can just provide "file containers".
- kentonv 12y ago
  Absolutely, if you port it! ;) https://github.com/sandstorm-io/sandstorm/wiki/Porting-Guide https://github.com/sandstorm-io/sandstorm/wiki/Porting-Guide Or nominate it to our app committee, who votes on apps to port: https://sandstorm.io/vote https://sandstorm.io/vote (The app committee is 32 people who purchased seats during our Indiegogo campaign.)

509 points by reinhardt1053 12y ago

The web site says apps cant perform psych experiments, and links to the contentious facebook emotion split test. I'm pretty sure you'll be able to do split testing on these apps... That small criticism aside, I'm very curious how developing for sandstorm would be different from from developing for a typical host. Anyone know the major differences?

swsieber 12y ago
One major thing that I can think of off the top of my head is that they provide the login and authentication for you and you just plug into it. They also have a sharing system in place that I think you can easily plug into.
pmontra 12y ago
I see that many old and new web applications run inside sandstorm, so it's a framework to manage apps. They probably have to be adapted a little but I don't think that WordPress has been rewritten to fit into sandstorm. Anything will do, probably. Furthermore you can download sandstorm and install it on your server.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
rdrey 12y ago
Sure, you could write an app that does A/B testing, but the whole idea is that people will use Sandstorm to run _personal_ servers/apps. And A/B testing your own reaction to an app doesn't make much sense. Runtime permissions of these apps will be easy to control, so the Sandstorm platform will prevent apps from phoning home without your permission.
- jorjordandan 12y ago
  Again thanks! But using Facebook was still a poorly chosen example of what their apps won't do, since they aren't aiming for hosting large customer facing apps like a social network. Perhaps that is what contributed to my confusion in the first place. Now I have a better understanding of what it's for.
- swsieber 12y ago
  Ah, but you could write an A/B testing page and then share it easily with your friends - part of the value proposition is 1) hosting your personal apps and 2) fine-grained sharing of it with others. So it wouldn't be a huge sampling, just your friends.
kentonv 12y ago
Once our sandbox is complete, apps will not be able to "phone home" unless the user grants permission, so users will need to opt into any experiments. Currently there are two reasons this isn't true yet: * We haven't implemented client-side sandboxing yet. It's not incredibly hard (content-security-policy header, some tweaking of apps), but hasn't hit the top of the priority queue. * The server sandbox currently has some intentionally-poked holes allowing apps to do things like pull RSS feeds from the internet. We plan to close these once the Powerbox UI is implemented, which is the main permission-granting interface, but that's a major project and we wanted to get some useful apps working in the meantime.
- tomjen3 12y ago
  Couldn't you do an AB test by having the code choose a random number on install (or first write to the datastore) and have it leak the results by loading an image or iframe with a special url/query parameter?
  - kentonv 12y ago
    With Content-Security-Policy we can prohibit an app from using images or other assets from third-party servers.

MayanAstronaut 12y ago

Looks great but memory usage is ambiguous. What if I load a data structure to over the 1gb allocation? If I need to load a 1.2gb dictionary the whole thing topple?

kentonv 12y ago
There is no 1GB limit. I think you might be confused about compute units? Compute units are just a measure of RAM usage over time -- a compute unit is 1GB of RAM used for one hour. An app can use more than 1GB of RAM; it will just consume compute units faster. E.g. an app using 2GB will consume a compute unit in 30 minutes. This all relates to our upcoming managed hosting. Self-hosted installs are not metered since it's your own hardware. https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2015-01-14-compute-units.html https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2015-01-14-compute-units.html

jorjordandan 12y ago

Would a sandstorm app prevent you from using say, Google analytics or new relic without getting a users permission?

rdrey 12y ago
I don't think Sandstorm wants to be a platform on which you host your large user-facing app. Instead it wants to be the platform on which you can install your personal wiki, ipython notebooks, your streaming media library, etc. You as the owner of the Sandstorm instance will control whether the apps on your instance can send data to Google for Google Analytics, for example. If you invite someone else to use an app on your Sandstorm instance, they will trust _you_ with their data and you can decide whether the apps on your instance share the data with Google or not.
- jorjordandan 12y ago
  Ah, that makes much more sense now! I think they need to figure out a better way to spell out their value proposition.

SimplyUseless 12y ago

On their github page, it still shows a warning about not using it for mission critical applications. https://github.com/sandstorm-io/sandstorm https://github.com/sandstorm-io/sandstorm

ocdtrekkie 12y ago
Well, it's kinda an Alpha. Goes without saying, doesn't it?

rdtsc 12y ago

Btw the main developer, Kenton Varda, is also the author of Cap-n-Proto -- a pretty neat serialization & RPC format. https://capnproto.org/ https://capnproto.org/ I was playing with that and stumbled on Sandstorm a while back.

swah 12y ago
He likes LAN parties: http://kentonsprojects.blogspot.com/2011/12/lan-party-optimized-house.html http://kentonsprojects.blogspot.com/2011/12/lan-party-optimi...
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- vtempest 12y ago
  I was there! Small world. I would definitely use sandstorm if I wasn't an IT guy.
green7ea 12y ago
Cap-n-Proto is awesome in so many ways. I'm trying sandstorm just for that.

polynomial 12y ago

This looks incredibly useful for things we're currently trying to make Docker do. Huge potential here.

S4M 12y ago
Can you give examples?
qiqing 12y ago
Hey polynomial, I'd love to learn more about your use case. Drop me a line at jade at sandstorm?

3zzy 12y ago

As a designer, the website gave me an 'aha- moment, nicely done! :)

ozh 12y ago

Sounds cool but I think the WordPress implementation is TERRIBLE: it depends on a WordPress fork that is completely outdated, instead of downloading an up-to-date fresh archive.

paulproteus 12y ago
I agree -- the current WordPress package needs work. Thank you for trying it and looking into it! Community-wise, one thing we're going to need, as Sandstorm grows, is an ecosystem of app package maintainers. Part of what we're hoping is that more developers of the apps themselves will maintain the Sandstorm ports, like Audrey Tang is maintaining the EtherCalc port. Tech-wise, one thing we're going to need is a solid story for how Sandstorm packages will easily stay up to date with the latest changes as the upstream author releases new updates. I work on+for Sandstorm, and I'm also a Debian developer. Debian is not a shining example with regard to either of the above, and I'm sure we can do even better at Sandstorm.
- tokenizerrr 12y ago
  Is it possible to run arbitrary Docker containers? If so, that could be a solution.
  - paulproteus 12y ago
    It's not currently possible to run arbitrary Docker containers through Sandstorm, since we prefer app packages (we call them SPKs) to be: * Self-contained -- if the app needs MySQL, bundle it; * Able to run with external network access unavailable -- this improves security, since even if an app gets compromised, it's not a big deal since it can't leak any data out to the world; and a few other constraints that are more technical than philosophical. https://github.com/sandstorm-io/sandstorm/wiki/Porting-Guide https://github.com/sandstorm-io/sandstorm/wiki/Porting-Guide hints at them, but I don't quickly find a reference for all these constraints. I'm likely to write such a reference in the next few days/weeks, though.
    - 12y ago

leonardinius 12y ago

It's the case of me scrolling the site and reading most of the GH readme - and still getting almost no idea what status it is, what is the goal/vision and how I might use it.. "We do LXC stuff in secure and user friendly way" is the message?

paulproteus 12y ago
Here's my own summary, which if you like it, I can try harder to make sure becomes more prominent somewhere: Sandstorm is a way to run web apps as containers, gloriously sandboxed from each other, and moreover a web interface to install them easily and allow the user to create multiple instances of a web app easily. It intends to grow features relating to sharing instances -- so that an instance of a web app is as easy to share with someone else as a Google Docs link -- and grow features relating to supporting more network protocols -- so that apps can safely communicate with the outside world, mediated by the person using Sandstorm. Right now, the target audience is people who like running web apps like WordPress or Ethercalc on their own server. In the future, the target audience will grow to include companies whose IT departments want to enable users to install web apps safely without asking IT first -- they'll know it's safe due to the glorious sandboxing.
- jorjordandan 12y ago
  How is glorious sandboxing different from regular sandboxing? Is there a 'glorious' certification? Just kidding - looks pretty awesome!!
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
kentonv 12y ago
Did you get a chance to try the demo? It was pretty overloaded earlier, but is in better shape now. https://demo.sandstorm.io https://demo.sandstorm.io

amirmc 12y ago

Things like Sandstorm are really important as they allow people options without becoming a full-blown sysadmin. Just look at how many crowd funding ideas are based on 'personal cloud' concepts. However, we also need to work on the fundamental problems to make it easier to build decentralised products in the first place (not everything is a web-app). Namely, how such apps are built, how they store/sync data, and how we deal with identity. The current tools simply aren't designed for the world we're heading towards, so we need to re-evaluate our assumptions. On top of this is the need for business models that don't rely on mass data collection (eg advertising) -- we can't rely on everything being open source but the underlying infrastructure must be. There are many ways forward and the particular approach I'm taking is based on unikernels and creating a modern stack to deal with the above issues directly. There's more info at http://amirchaudhry.com/brewing-miso-to-serve-nymote/ http://amirchaudhry.com/brewing-miso-to-serve-nymote/ If anyone happens to be at FOSDEM this weekend I'd be happy to chat about these ideas in person.

jackweirdy 12y ago
Will you be talking about Mirage/other bits of your work at FOSDEM, or are you “just” attending?
- amirmc 12y ago
  Not speaking but doing a demo at the Xen booth on Saturday (likely 1pm-3pm but email me to be sure). The repo has details about the demo if you're interested (though it's probably also a spoiler) https://github.com/amirmc/fosdemo https://github.com/amirmc/fosdemo
paulproteus 12y ago
I'm at FOSDEM! I'm on #fosdem and #sandstorm on freenode -- my nick is paulproteus. Also I work on+for Sandstorm.
mempko 12y ago
I love the idea of unikernels! I took a much high level approach for p2p apps with Fire★ (http://firestr.com http://firestr.com). Where it is GUI centric and has a built in app editor (all application code is viewable/editable). My only concern with the unikernel approach is that you can end up with a system where the code is not viewable and editable. Have you thought about that concern?

dominotw 12y ago

The logo is very cute. I love it.

qiqing 12y ago
Thanks! h/t to Néna Nguyễn :)

idiotclock 12y ago

Would this also work for a GNU Social or pump.io service? Or diaspora?

ocdtrekkie 12y ago
One of the Sandstorm devs is already working on porting Diaspora. pump.io has been mentioned as a possible thing to port.

CalRobert 12y ago

This is exactly what needs to exist. I recently set up Ghost, Owncloud, and Gitlab on a personal server (odroid U3) that sits under my couch at home, and it's really rewarding to own the hardware which is my "cloud". However, it should be easier, and possible for anyone. Good for you guys.

maninalift 12y ago
ghost what?
- iamdave 12y ago
  http://ghost.org http://ghost.org - it's a markdown based blog engine that gets out of your way and lets you focus on writing. I run it for my blog and love it. There are a few features that I'd really like to have, but I get around them by editing locally.
- ocdtrekkie 12y ago
  Ghost is a blogging platform! https://ghost.org/ https://ghost.org/
- teh_klev 12y ago
  This probably: https://ghost.org/ https://ghost.org/
- CalRobert 12y ago
  Below commenters are correct - the blog platform.
- e12e 12y ago
  Incidentally, running containers is probably a great way to "install" the ghost libc vulnerability[1] (assuming you're basing off of base-images made before the bug was patched, and you haven't updated your containers/images). I'm not sure neither vagrant nor docker have this really fixed -- that is: easily patching the base system/image (and still be confident that the app keeps running). Is there an easy way to update a container based off of a (possibly few generations remote) base-image? Eg: You've pulled down a bare-bones, official CoreOS/Ubuntu/Debian/RedHat image from docker -- set it up for your use-case (say made a base image with your own CA-cert bundled, wired it up for kerberos/ldap/AD, maybe set up a trusted ssh-server ca-cert) -- then made a handful of images based off that: db, cache, and web-app. Is there an easy way to patch the base image and all descendants? I assume all state should be in other volumes, so maybe this is easier than I think? At any rate, it is something to keep in mind -- that grabbing images are great, but updates are still needed! As other mention, the ghost refereed to by gp, is a blogging platform. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8953545 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8953545

sarciszewski 12y ago

> Contributors: Jasvir Nagra <img src=x onerror=alert()> Nice try :)

kentonv 12y ago
I love that Jas (being on the Google security team) just instinctively XSS's any form he fills out, and I love that our code just leaves his tag there, properly escaped, for all to see.

debacle 12y ago

I don't understand what this is. Can someone explain? What the hell does "This is the only way to make Open Source web apps viable." mean?

ocdtrekkie 12y ago
The primary idea being that open source web apps can be used without having to be a server admin. Non-technical users can install apps on a Sandstorm server as easily as installing apps on their phone.
- cben 12y ago
  More details: https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2014-07-21-open-source-web-apps-require-federated-hosting.html https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2014-07-21-open-source-web-ap... The central point (IMO) was economical: self-hosting frees developer from expenses. Trivial installation is just a pre-requisite for self-hosting to be acceptable.

mmccaff 12y ago

The web page is beautiful. It might help to emphasize where this sits between installing Docker images from the repo, and using something like Webuzo or Softaculous to install popular web apps.

j_s 12y ago

The easiest way to get your own LibreBoard while they straighten out their DMCA from Trello! :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8936701 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8936701

daemonk 12y ago

Is this like a cloud docker?

qiqing 12y ago
We use the same Linux kernel features that Docker uses, but we use them directly. Here's a deeper explanation: https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2014-08-19-why-not-run-docker-apps.html https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2014-08-19-why-not-run-docker...

iamwil 12y ago

How do you get individually installed apps to selectively share data with other installations? I imagine something like diaspora tried solving this problem. Is there a general solution for any app?

kentonv 12y ago
This is something we're still building (Sandstorm is still in alpha), but what we have in mind we call the Powerbox. The idea is that one app can say to the system "I implement such and such protocol at such and such endpoint". Later on, some other app can say "I need something implementing such and such protocol". The system itself displays a picker, showing the user all of their other apps that may satisfy the requirement. When the user makes a choice, the requesting app is told how to contact the providing app and is implicitly given permission to do so, whereas prior to the exchange the apps had no ability to talk to each other. The user can inspect these connections later and potentially revoke them. This is a whole lot easier for the user than going to the providing app and editing an ACL, then going to the requesting app and giving it an endpoint address, etc. The way this is implemented under the hood is in terms of Cap'n Proto capability-based RPC. Blog post on that: https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2014-12-15-capnproto-0.5.html https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2014-12-15-capnproto-0.5.html
- iamwil 12y ago
  That's pretty neat it's like the android intent system. How does the system get the list of all other apps that satisfy the requirement? I'm guessing all apps register with sandstorm server somewhere that has a centralized list of other servers? It'd be neat to have standard protocols, in the same way we have standard media types.
  - kentonv 12y ago
    The system knows about other apps installed on your server, but not necessarily apps on other servers. To connect to something on another server you will usually want to obtain a Cap'n Proto capability to it. You might do this through, say, a messaging app that has the ability to embed capabilities. Your friend sends you a message with a capability to some object on their server, and then your messaging app publishes that capability on the receiving server, such that it will now appear in the powerbox for other apps on that server. Alternatively (less cool, but more practical), you might just drop a URL into the Powerbox and Sandstorm will connect to it and turn it into a capability.

falcolas 12y ago

I'm a DevOps developer, so keep that in mind as you read below. Sandstorm looks insecure and inefficient, but that probably won't matter. The ease of use for the end user trumps all. Users will love this, but I'm not looking forwarding to having to administer boxes running Sandstorm, though. I imagine there will be a fair bit of work from my end to re-building apps so they can take advantage of tuned settings, shared services, caches, and the like. Plus figuring out a way to automate the usual securing, managing, monitoring, and cleanup around the Sandstorm environment. Identifying bottlenecks will be fun too, though my first instinct will probably be to look at the Cap'n'Protocol bridge which Sandstorm runs everything through.

jerf 12y ago
"Sandstorm looks insecure and inefficient, but that probably won't matter." You may need to expand on that. It is not clear that you know what they're doing with sandboxing, etc. If you are, then I'm definitely interested in your further criticism, if this was a knee-jerk response I think it's unjustified. "I imagine there will be a fair bit of work from my end to re-building apps so they can take advantage of tuned settings, shared services, caches, and the like." Are you building apps that you expect people to deploy to their personal servers on a routine basis? For normal DevOps folks working inside of a corporation, Sandstorm is a complete non-event. It's not targeted at any part of your pipeline. The fact you're asking about bottlenecks makes me wonder a bit if you understand where this is targeted, too; frankly Sandstorm could slow everything it runs down by a factor of 10 and I wouldn't notice. My VPS that I would run sandstorm on is 99.9% idle anyhow, if not 99.99%.
- falcolas 12y ago
  I addressed the security concern in a response to kentonv, please feel free to comment more on that one. > Sandstorm is a complete non-event. I am speaking from the point of view of someone who may be asked to run and manage Sandstorm servers. Either as a service to sell, or as a service for internal customers. This is a very different use case than using it for just myself. And if I'm honest, this isn't something I'd need to or want to run for myself. I'm comfortable with managing shared services and propping up web frontends. So no, I am not the targeted user of this software; however, I am the one who gets to write tools and processes to support those targeted users at some point in the future.

themoonbus 12y ago

Here is how to write a landing page. Big letters: "Sandstorm makes it easier to do XYZ" or "Sandstorm lets you do XYZ by doing XYZ" E.g. "Sandstorm lets you run your own personal web applications without needing a background in IT!" or "Sandstorm lets you to install personal web apps as easily as you install mobile apps!" 3 examples of what this could actually mean for 80% of your users "Run your own Dropbox!" "Host your own WordPress Blog!" "Get a mailbox to match your personalized email address!" THEN drill down into what it actually is (Sandstorm is a open source platform that makes it easier to run and manage your own personal server, yadda yadda), and its more specific features, such as usability, security, etc. (This advice operates under the assumption that "individuals" are your main target audience.)

qiqing 12y ago
Thanks for your feedback!
larrybud 12y ago
+1 I went to Sandstorm's home page, and spent the first 5 minutes trying to figure out what it is & what it does. "Sandstorm is an open source platform for personal servers". Ok, fine, but what is it REALLY? What does it do? Why is it better than (hosting / VPS hosting / AWS / Docker / PaaS)? Give me some examples of what I can do with it. Sorry, you lost me with your home page.
- roadnottaken 12y ago
  I had the same experience. Still don't get it.
  - kentonv 12y ago
    Question: Did either of you try the demo? (I know it was kind of broken under all the traffic earlier.) Usually the demo is what makes people "get it". It's been surprisingly difficult to find a sentence or two that describe Sandstorm in a way that is effective on everyone. For any text we use, different sets of people get it or are confused. :/

api 12y ago

I've been following this for a while and really like it. Have yet to try an install but probably will once it's more mature. Dumb question: why not build on and leverage Docker? I'm sure you have an answer. I'm just curious.

kentonv 12y ago
Indeed, we have a whole blog post about that. :) https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2014-08-19-why-not-run-docker-apps.html https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2014-08-19-why-not-run-docker...
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

kornakiewicz 12y ago

What's make me curious - do you plan enable option for selling apps? As a developer I would be more than happy to allow user install my app, but since I am not charity I would like to earn some money on it as well.

kentonv 12y ago
Yes, we'll have an app store much like iPhone/Android. Open source apps will have the option of using a "pay what you want" model, but we'll also allow proprietary apps with fixed prices and maybe even subscription-based.
- kornakiewicz 12y ago
  Great to read. Fingers crossed for the project.

bovermyer 12y ago

This is actually pretty fantastic. I loved how quickly I could get an app up and running. I assume that the paid version has a better app search/browse experience? The demo list, while cool, was pretty long and uncategorized.

kentonv 12y ago
Yeah the demo "app list" is just a placeholder. We're working on an "app store" with self-service uploads, searchability, paid apps, pay-what-you-want for open source apps, etc. Once it is ready it will be available to everyone, whether you use self-hosting or managed.
- bovermyer 12y ago
  I appreciate this very, very much. You have my attention.

tomc1985 12y ago

Enough with the cute! We're developers, not a gaggle of teenage girls!

alinspired 12y ago

on the first glance it's similar cpanel or plesk, but opensource, will take a look!

seagreen 12y ago

Does anybody have any thoughts on the differences between Sandstorm, Camlistore, and Tent? It seems there are a number of problems here. We need: 1. Better data stores 2. Better server environments 3. Better ways to share data with others I wonder if Camlistore's approach might not be the cleanest, since it doesn't try to bundle (1) and (2) together. EDIT: Not to get too sappy, but any of these would be _fantastic_ compared to our current Web 2.0 disaster, and I'm glad Sandstorm is picking up steam.

kentonv 12y ago
Camlistore and Tent are both complimentary to Sandstorm. Sandstorm gives you a way to run apps easily, Camlistore is a structured storage system which other apps could connect to, and Tent is a federation protocol that apps could use to talk to each other. I'd like to see this all converge at some point. :)
- seagreen 12y ago
  That's awesome news. I'm suspicious there's too much overlap between Camlistore and Tent for them to both be useful, since they each do data storage and sharing, but that's not your problem:)

alfg 12y ago

Very cool project. I've played around with this same idea, but as a CLI package manager, rather than a webapp. I think it would be cool to have custom VPS image, where you can install webapps to it from the CLI out of the box easily. Sort of like homebrew, but for your personal servers. Congrats!

gregimba 12y ago

This isn't really anything to write home about.

69_years_and 12y ago

Sandstorm - this is wickedly cool, tried the demo and it worked great, can't understand all the 'do this, do that' comments. As someone who is just learning to play with docker - just finished dockerizing all my vps apps so the first thing I think of is there a Dockerfile to build this or a docker image - off to have a look for one. Awesome stuff - like the collection of apps you have ready to go. Maybe you have fixed the landing web page in the meantime but I had no trouble understanding what you are about. 100.times upvote.

kentonv 12y ago
Thanks!

davidjgraph 12y ago

There's a lot of focus of how sandstorm allows you to run web applications easily without having to setup the back-end that they need without SS. There is an additional edge case, that's of web applications that don't have a back-end at all, ours falls into that category. Our web app is a by-product of two of our commercial products, but we don't actually have user management, storage, etc. Online we integrate with Google Drive and Dropbox, but you can't create an account with us and store your data with us. Sandstorm allow people to deploy our web app, whereas you can't at all, previously. It saves us months of work creating and maintaining the functionality it provides.

e12e 12y ago

First(?) discussion on hn: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7460828 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7460828 After about a year -- how tied up is sandstorm to meteor? I confess I have issues with the our-way-or-the-highway nature of meteor (our js, our db, our app-server) -- even if I can see that it does appear to give some pretty nice benefits for rapid prototyping. I'd love to see sandstorm as a handful of small tools with various uis on top: command line, web, etc. Seems like it should be possible to do with (on the extreme end) go and and a berkley/sqlite db+file system for images?

kentonv 12y ago
Sandstorm's front-end UI is built on Meteor, but this doesn't affect apps -- they can be written using any stack. We have apps written in Meteor, Express, Rails, PHP, Python, C++, and Rust. Meteor is actually amazingly modular if you look under the hood. We use it in a fairly default configuration, but it's easy for me to see how I would go about using a different database or a different templating language. Those people write high-quality code. Eventually I would like to ditch Mongo and instead have Meteor speaking Cap'n Proto RPC to a Cap'n Proto database. I don't expect that I'll have much trouble getting Meteor to do this. > I'd love to see sandstorm as a handful of small tools with various uis on top: command line, web, etc. Hmm, not sure I understand what you're suggesting. Sandstorm is all about UI and running web apps, so it seems to me that a "command-line interface to Sandstorm" would really be a whole different project. :)

shric 12y ago

What's the name of the song?

iagooar 12y ago
I thought that too, but was afraid to post it fearing the negative votes ;)

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

cyberrodent 12y ago

From https://demo.sandstorm.io/demo https://demo.sandstorm.io/demo : "We only have one machine. It may get slow or crashy under excessive load."

kentonv 12y ago
And indeed, when we were #1 on HN yesterday morning with hundreds of apps running concurrently, it got a bit slow and crashy. :) But things cleared up after the traffic died down a bit. Our upcoming managed hosting service will, of course, use multiple machines with automagic scaling.

JimXugle 12y ago

There's also YunoHost, a project with similar goals. I've played around with it, but it seems to be beta quality. https://yunohost.org https://yunohost.org

Hello71 12y ago

> No protection from getting your job done: Security can often be a hassle, getting in the way of your work. Sandstorm is different. When you tell a Sandstorm app to talk to some other app, or to talk to the internet, Sandstorm sees your intent and automatically grants it access. So, you are never interrupted by a prompt asking "Do you want to allow this app to the thing you just told it to do?" And yet, the apps only get the permissions you actually wanted them to have. So... the program is psychic?

RaleyField 12y ago
> So... the program is psychic? No, it's just based on DOS.

jmsdnns 12y ago

I really appreciate the humor in Cap'n Proto. That makes the dev team seem like a fun group to hang with.

nodejsisbest 12y ago

Darude Sandstorm is going to conflict with this projects name a bit?

bmoresbest55 12y ago

I am not really sure why this is so exciting to everyone. I have seen a couple comments asking what this software does, explicitly. I will admit I like the idea of personal servers but I am not sure how to apply this potential amazing software to my life. Suggestions?

netsurfer912 12y ago

Darude - Sandstorm (sorry)

relaxitup 12y ago

kentonv, any chance of getting a nice extended (eg, support for more than just text; file formats like images etc as well) (or even just regular) pastebin app added to Sandstorm? Perhaps something like bepasty ( https://github.com/bepasty/bepasty-server https://github.com/bepasty/bepasty-server ) or Hosty ( https://bitbucket.org/xrstf/hosty https://bitbucket.org/xrstf/hosty ).

ocdtrekkie 12y ago
That sort of thing is definitely well in the scope of apps that'd be good to port to Sandstorm. There's a lot of basic apps the platform still needs. Bepasty in particular sounds like a really neat potential app that can just provide "file containers".
kentonv 12y ago
Absolutely, if you port it! ;) https://github.com/sandstorm-io/sandstorm/wiki/Porting-Guide https://github.com/sandstorm-io/sandstorm/wiki/Porting-Guide Or nominate it to our app committee, who votes on apps to port: https://sandstorm.io/vote https://sandstorm.io/vote (The app committee is 32 people who purchased seats during our Indiegogo campaign.)