This month in Co-op Cloud August 2021

Happy September folks! Time for another recap of what we’ve been up to.

Go, Abra! (go-abra)

Our rewrite of abra, the Co-op Cloud command-line tool, continues apace: the server/recipe commands are completed, progress can be seen on TODO.md. We’re working on design and usability as we go. The new command-line seems to remove the need to install Docker locally which is a huge win for portability ⛅

@roxxers has set up our own Golang package repositories in coop-cloud/coopcloud.tech#20, so we can now do things like go get coopcloud.tech/abra for package installations.

@roxxers also put together abra-git, an Arch AUR package of abra 🌈

@decentral1se published a Golang library which helps make decisions about the semantic versions of Docker tags. Feel free to check it out over in tagcmp, we’re using it for abra.

Windows documentation

@timewarp has been working on Windows documentation in coop-cloud-win-deploy! There is an official release over here.

Versioning

The machine-readable app index on apps.coopcloud.tech was down, but now it is back with all the new apps 💪

Meanwhile, recipes.coopcloud.tech got some shiny new updates, including being able to filter the app list by score and name. Adding filtering has highlighted the amazing performance of Elm apps, giving near-instant feedback in a way that seems strange and refreshing in this age of every-button-click-usually-fires-off-20-HTTP-requests-and-1,000-DOM-changes. Still remains to be seen if it’s a good long-term choice.

New apps

• ghost, blogging/website platform, by @3wc
• mumble voice chat, by @3wc
• botamusique, Mumble music bot, by @3wc
• calendso, appointment bookings service, by @3wc
• firefly-iii, personal finance manager, by @knoflook
• mobilizon, decentralised events platform, by @3wc
• laplace, WebRTC screensharing, by @3wc

If you’ve got ideas for other apps you’d like to see packaged, feel free to add them straight to the app packaging request list on git.coopcloud.tech (remember, you can log in directly with either Gitlab or Github).

Community contributions

As well as the bits already mentioned, amazing contributions from individuals are still rolling in, including:

• abra app remove and abra app volume ls/rm by @knoflook
• Prometheus monitoring support in coop-cloud/traefik by @mirsal

Co-op Cloud in the wild

Wiki.cafe, a new project to explore a coöperatively-run Federated Wiki hosting and training collective, is running all its infrastructure, including Discourse, Nextcloud, Keycloak, and Federated Wiki itself, using Co-op Cloud. Watch this space!

We’ve been talking to our comrades at Social.coop, who are hosting our Co-op Cloud fediverse presence, about helping simplify their infrastructure with Co-op Cloud as well: they’re running a lot and doing awesome work with a small, volunteer team – exactly the kind of folks we want to support.

We’ve spoken to the developers of Penpot via their Gitter chat (also on Matrix 🤯); it’s great to be building links with more of the upstream projects we’re packaging.

Threndol Tutoring, academic support in South Africa for “students who have learning obstacles such as ADHD, dyslexia, executive function deficits and confidence struggles”, is using an instance of the Co-op Cloud Calendso package to manage student bookings. As well as helping test Calendso, which could turn out to be a useful tool to recommend to a lot of organisations, it’s great to be helping save funds which would otherwise be going to the $3B revenue, venture-capital-funded Calendly. $8/month for Software as a Service is a lot in a place where the minimum wage is $1.50/hour…

Lastly, we’ve got a new Co-op Cloud Community Organising Matrix channel to discuss alliances, collaborations, and links with other groups. We joined the #selfhosted room on Matrix already, to keep another ear on the ground with the self-hosting landscape; swing by and let us know if there are any other communities you think we should be talking to 🙏

If any of this sounds interesting, please drop by our Matrix space and say hello 👋. We’d love to hear from you and to have a chat about what you think of the project and how it might be useful for you 💗 You can also follow the project on Twitter and/or the Fediverse.