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Cloud in a Bottle: making self-hosting accessible to everyone

653 points by zplizzi 11d ago

baalimago 11d ago
A bit narrow definition of a "cloud", no..? More like a microservice server on rails Bits missing from cloud being global CDN (selfhosted), routing, regional sharding, etc.
bitpush 11d ago
> In the pre-cloud days, open source worked - authors distributed their software, and everyone "hosted" it for themselves (i.e. ran it on their own PC) This is just rose tinted vision of the past. None of the software of the past had the capability, reliability or robustness of modern sass.
- em-bee 11d ago
  that statement does not make any claims about capability, reliability or robustness. the claims are rather cost and independence.
- wookmaster 11d ago
  I'm rather baffled by that statement, with docker its...as easy as its ever been
  - lmz 11d ago
    "capability, reliability or robustness" has nothing to do with ease.
  - gucci-on-fleek 11d ago
    Docker was first released 11 years after AWS though, so I'm not really sure that it counts as "pre-cloud". Regardless, I agree that Docker has made self-hosting stuff pretty easy, and arguably even easier than it was in the pre-cloud days.
- marknsikora 11d ago
  Yea. When people talk about how simple things were in the past, I think they oblivious to the fact we were all writing out X11 configs by hand and having them break in all sort of strange and interesting ways. Open source has always been very "I gave it to you for free, I'm not going to hold your hand".
  - wizzwizz4 11d ago
    I've written X configs by hand, but only to get a few extra pixels of overscan. I've never needed to do this. My experience has always been that things just work. The UI has never been great, in that I need more explanation than the built-in manuals provide – unlike, say, Windows 95, where you can learn everything you need to know by clicking around – but it's not hard to avoid breaking things, and it's not that hard to learn to do new stuff if you have a good book (or, lately, blog post) to consult.
    - yoz-y 11d ago
      The amount of sleepless nights because an update broke sound, video or networking on Linux is uncountable. It was fun though.
EGreg 11d ago
How do I reach out to you? We're building something that you might want to be a part of. (The "Safebox" comes with all the software you need, and you can just clone its AMI on AWS etc.) Would love to have a conversation. If you want to message me, find my email on https://qbix.com/about https://qbix.com/about
drunner 11d ago
I think the time for this space is here. The appetite to depart from subscriptions and loaning your personal data to ad/ai companies is stronger than ever. Currently, a lot of this space is docker compose based and simply inaccessible to so many who may otherwise be interested. Whether or not it's this project or another, I hope something gathers enough steam soon to truly break the barriers to entry.
- cube00 11d ago
  > The appetite to depart from subscriptions and loaning your personal data to ad/ai companies is stronger than ever. Only on HN, the general public don't care, they don't even know the name of their web browser.
  - sevenzero 11d ago
    True, most people get the full ad driven internet experience and it drives me nuts. Everytime I have to help other people with computer stuff I almost get an aneurysm when opening their browser...
    - vonunov 11d ago
      At some point I started just installing ABP/uBO without even bothering to ask/tell them, if I had the opportunity. So far my reads seem to have been correct regarding whether this would conflict with each person's typical web use, as I've never heard back about any trouble.
  - myaccountonhn 11d ago
    General public is weird because everyone, yet no one, is the general public. Fwiw I've started to see a shift in many non-tech circles I'm a part of. Especially when you take the time to explain the problems. Many do care, they just aren't made aware of the issues.
    - edoceo 11d ago
      GP typically means middle of the bell-curve. HN visitors and for sure commenters are at the edge of that curve...3-sta-nines away.
joshmn 11d ago
An aside: Fantastico was such a wonderful piece of software for me to learn and toy and tinker with web stuff. I was so impressed by the simplicity of it. (I phased out of the shared scene a almost two decades ago; I guess everyone moved to Softaculous, https://softaculous.com/fantastico/ https://softaculous.com/fantastico/)
jerf 11d ago
"We (Imbue, the company I work for) also offer a managed version, which I think is really important to making this widely accessible - and it gives us a straightforward business model to support the project." Looking at your hosted page, I see no reference to backups. I see in your docs reference to backup, but you should definitely offer some sort of turnkey, appropriately-marked-up backup solution. Configuration difficulty is what kills self-hosting on the front end, updates make it hard over time, but when it all dies and then I have no backup is when I give up. I can't find any reference to disk size limits anywhere. Can I host Immich on this? Can I host my media server? What will it cost? Surely not $10/month for my media collection. I'm not a hoarder and mostly have stuff ripped from my personally-owned media, which limits the size, and you're still not hosting that for $10/month. I see you have Jellyfin in the set of apps but I don't know what it will cost. The CPU & RAM limits I understand from the deploy page. Oh, and I'm specifically referring to your hosted service here.
- zplizzi 11d ago
  (author here) Thanks for flagging, I should make this more clear. Our managed instances have pretty small disks (~50GB), but there's a way to link a S3 bucket to your instance to use for bulk data storage. Apps that store bulk data (like immich/jellyfin) should automatically put it in the "archive data tier" which can be configured to go into this S3 bucket instead of local storage. We're planning to make this (and backups) an auto-configured part of our managed instances - billed separately (so you pay for just the additional storage you use; cloudflare R2 (S3 compatible) at-cost is like $15/TB/mo so it should be in that neighborhood). See docs on how this works: https://cloudinabottle.org/docs/how_it_works/data.html#the-archive-tier https://cloudinabottle.org/docs/how_it_works/data.html#the-a...
pietz 11d ago
In case someone is asking: THIS is what a launch article should be like. 10/10.
0c3ca83 11d ago
It's weird seeing someone trying to promote self-hosting, while building everything with Claude.
- ravenstine 11d ago
  Does self-hosting need to be all or nothing?
  - Forgeties79 11d ago
    I didn’t get that from their comment at all
- majorchord 11d ago
  "It's weird seeing someone pay for food when they have a garden at home."
  - zdragnar 11d ago
    LLMs can be self hosted though. Using Claude to build a self hosting platform is a bit like telling people they should be vegan while you're eating a bacon sandwich.
    - TaLiTr 9d ago
      In what way are those remotely similar? Veganism is incompatible with bacon. You can self-host, and also pay for cloud services when they are better than what you can self-host. If anything it's like suggesting making food instead of getting takeout while buying bread from the store, because it's better than what you can make at home.
  - 0c3ca83 8d ago
    It's weird seeing someone promote home gardening by selling grocery store products.
- senectus1 11d ago
  AI is a tool. the use of this tool to deliver something unrelated is... unrelated
Winfred-zz 11d ago
>At the core, it's just an Ubuntu machine with a web server that hosts a dashboard and routes HTTP(s) requests to containerized apps. So no fail over/redundancy? I think at minimum it should be two machines, so one can break. That is one of the important features of cloud applications as far as I'm concerned. You don't have to deal with the problem of a single computer breaking.
- praseodym 11d ago
  This also adds a lot of moving parts and failure modes. For self-hosting I’d rather have downtime on a simple system that’s easy to fix rather than a complex setup that stays up but needs more maintenance when some component fails.
  - Winfred-zz 10d ago
    It's containerized. It's an easy enough problem to solve, if you don't want it complicated. Here's what I did with my own setup: Stop the containers at night, copy the files to a second system that's configured with the same containers and that can become the primary as needed. I already monitor my systems for health and backup states, so these would be added to that. But all that does take a few hours to set up. You want your backups regardless and you want to have some certainty they're working/good. It's a problem that needs to be addressed, even you are going to agree with me on that.
- ball_of_lint 11d ago
  As soon as you add multiple instances you have to consider concurrency for every app you add, which is a huge cost on the app development side.
- wiether 11d ago
  > So no fail over/redundancy? I think at minimum it should be two machines, so one can break. Do you have two instances of everything in your life? It's clear this product is intended for personal use. I guess you have a couch in your home. This couch can seat friends/family. Yet you don't have a spare one?
bo1024 11d ago
Cloudron does something very similar (I'm a user): https://www.cloudron.io/ https://www.cloudron.io/
- cpa 11d ago
  Indeed, been using them since 2019 and it just works.
- educar 10d ago
  Yup, they just released Cloudron 10
  - deleted 9d ago
    [deleted]
  - devenquan 9d ago
    [flagged]
- mmlkrx 10d ago
  Really happy with Cloudron as well. Have been using it since 2022 for a small business and personally. They recently added community apps so now there is an official way for the community to add apps that are not yet officially supported. Really amazing product and pretty rock solid have migrated a complete Cloudron installation from one server to another a couple of times without issues.
- synchrone 9d ago
  cloudron has that elbow grease that only comes from years of running a project with an actual community of real users: a solid platform featureset like backups, DB management or mail sending, but also addressing niche apps' needs like .well-known or custom ports, UDP, server certificates available to the app and not just on platform frontend proxy layer highly recommend!
andrewoneone 11d ago
seems kind of like https://caprover.com/ https://caprover.com/
- VonGuard 11d ago
  Yeah, but Docker Swarm?
skybrian 11d ago
This pitch is somewhat interesting, but, much like Sandstorm, browsing the library of pre-built apps kind of leaves me cold. It's too much like browsing a rather tiny mobile app store. There are maybe three apps that I might be interested in. Since we have AI now, I think exe.dev's pitch is better: they provide Linux VMs, a web proxy, and integrations. You can ask the AI to build whatever web app you like. I'd love to have exe.dev, but running on my Mac Mini.
- dbmikus 11d ago
  > I'd love to have exe.dev, but running on my Mac Mini. I'm working on exactly this bit (with some more tuning for messaging AI agents) https://github.com/gofixpoint/amika https://github.com/gofixpoint/amika Doesn't run on your Mac Mini yet, but should get that enabled either this week or next If you sign up (free) I'll send you an email when the "Mac Mini mode + full OSS self-hosting" is live
- prologic 11d ago
  What apps were you looking for that you wouldn't find in the catalog?
  - skybrian 10d ago
    I don't really know. Maybe a continuous build server? But just because it's listed in the catalog doesn't mean it's the one I want to use.
- imtringued 11d ago
  Wouldn't it make more sense to just ask AI to generate the cloud in a bottle files for the apps that are missing from the library?
armanj 11d ago
systemd is all you need
- INTPenis 11d ago
  systemd and ansible
- nvader 11d ago
  And someone else's machine
redrix 11d ago
If this can largely automate the backup and update side of things, then it seems like a great middle ground for people like me: I’m trying to self-host as much of my stuff as possible, but don’t have time to tinker like I used to. Hence updates, backups (etc) fall by the wayside in favour of “set and forget”.
jasongi 11d ago
I remember back when I first got into self-hosting (over a decade ago), I had a Netgear READYNAS. People made a small amount of plugins you could install. But the CPU was ARM before that was cool (I think mine was actually SPARC!) so it was a lot of effort to get things to compile, so plugins were usually quite outdated. Then I decided to painfully break out of vendor lock-in, built my own NAS with FreeNAS which was all the rage (still attached to a vendor, but at least I could control the hardware). This was before Docker really took off - the plugins were installed in FreeBSD jails. It worked for a while, but again, plugins could be woefully out of date and broken, upgrading the OS was a pain and would break all your plugins. Through the 10+ years of this... I now follow two simple rules: - separate your network storage and application hosting. Yes, it complicates things a little bit with NFS setups but it is a forcing function for a more resilient setup - use the docker container provided by the maintainers or LinuxServer.io. Vendor maintained wrappers can be initially helpful but end up as a form of tech debt when they're abandoned or neutered - especially when they're freemium and the company starts looking to squeeze. The quiet part of self-hosting is that it shifts the responsibility of security to the user. I'm sure cloudinabottle has more sensible defaults than provided docker containers, or builds in reverse proxies etc, but I doubt they're offering to take on liability for data loss or breaches. The problem I see you'll face are two-fold: 1. Projects like this have the power users self-select away from it and those who need a lot of hand-holding to self-select into it. If I know how to configure and deploy a docker container already I have no incentive to contribute. ReadyNAS got around this by having folks charge for their plugins (that were just OSS projects packaged up for their OS) but then it ruins the appeal, they likely only got away with it because they were only a couple of bucks and you were already locked in to the ecosystem via the hardware. 2. If the hosted aspect actually makes you money, required for the project to be continued long term, capitalism will ensure that incumbent cloud providers take that away from you by offering ready-made instances at your cost-price, like they did with redis, elasticsearch etc. Note that these are only issues if you're motivated by making a profit, or even a cost-neutral project. But if this is a charitable exercise backed by an entity that doesn't need the money, I wish you all the best - more things that let people dip their toes in are good! The cloud is all rent-seeking subscriptions and even with the recent supply shortages: fast, small, low-power compute is incredibly cheap these days, especially old business/mini machines.
passive 11d ago
I really like the idea, and I would like to see Tailscale evolve Aperture in this direction. Tailscale is already an easy way for anyone to connect their devices, which is essential for any sort of "personal cloud", and Aperture, while initially something of an AI gateway, is also facilitating connections to other services and apps. If you're building a personal cloud, you also want your AI connected to it, but probably with some degree of management. Aperture already provides a fair amount in this area, and probably with a connector for Cloud in a Bottle, could give your AI safe access.
- hebetude 11d ago
  Yep, tailscale, sync things. Glued together a lot of services
tesnorindian 11d ago
Reminds me of my old idea dating back to 2014 (https://linuxdreams.blogspot.com/2015/03/cloud-in-box-appliance.html?m=1 https://linuxdreams.blogspot.com/2015/03/cloud-in-box-applia...). Interestingly the blog is still active. I did a few pitches related to this at Nasscom Startup warehouse and IITM RTBI. Though this was welcomed by the panel members but it never took off due to lack of capital for such a startup during those times in India. I had to abandon and focus on my day job.
kolleraa 11d ago
This is a great project! Yes, the personal cloud is coming and it's going to be for everyone. I'm working on a project with similar goals but some different design decisions - instead of the typical containers I'm going for thin-client apps that hit a common data layer built on a fully serverless architecture. Not ready for production quite yet, but for those interested: https://starkeep.app/ https://starkeep.app/
anigbrowl 11d ago
How is this different from say Docker? I procrastinated getting acquainted with the latter for a long time because I thought it was more for industrial-scale infrastructure, but when I finally wound up using it I was surprised at how easy and low-maintenance it was.
- ball_of_lint 11d ago
  UI and UX. Auth. Out of the box apps get their own domain name. Try it out and see
deleted 11d ago
[deleted]
charcircuit 11d ago
No offense, but this is not accessible to everyone. Seriously, take a look at the setup instructions and tell me with a straight face that a 4 year old could set this up. https://cloudinabottle.org/docs/setup/shared_homeserver.html https://cloudinabottle.org/docs/setup/shared_homeserver.html There's no reason this couldn't be made as simple as double clicking a .exe and then the whole thing gets setup.
- TaLiTr 9d ago
  > Seriously, take a look at the setup instructions and tell me with a straight face that a 4 year old could set this up. It's also not accessible to people in comas, what's your point? The instructions are "import the file into VM software" and that's enough to get you something you can connect to over a web browser.
2OEH8eoCRo0 11d ago
I've been interested in something like this for awhile. Cloud or self hosting in-a-box. Should be simple for layman.
wmf 11d ago
Seems weird not to mention Umbrel.
6thbit 11d ago
Running the authoritative dns for the zone seems elegant, although wouldn’t that imply you absolutely can’t use cloudflare or similar services to avoid ddos/bots?
- User95945 10d ago
  [flagged]
rgun 11d ago
Great project! I have had conversations along these lines with my colleagues for quite some time now. Will definitely try. The docs mention cloudinabottle.toml but the app repos all have openhost.toml. Did you folks change the name of the platform? Also, can you point to how the unified auth works? Couldn't find anything in the manifest spec.
- ball_of_lint 11d ago
  Yeah, it was called Openhost for a while before changing to Cloud in a Bottle. Either filename works. It proxies requests from the user to installed apps, and adds a header 'is-owner'. Apps have to be built to respect that header - some apps do this by running their own little proxy/sidecar that will detect that header and inject saved credentials.
Eji1700 11d ago
Curious how this compares to Cosmos Cloud (https://cosmos-cloud.io/ https://cosmos-cloud.io/). I picked it a few years ago for much the same reason as anyone else (sick of this shit), and it's main attraction to me was it being a turnkey solution that focus security so i wasn't as likely to completely fuck everything important up. I think a "simple" installation package would be very attractive to most people, and while cosmos has a lot of growing to do in order to be that, I'm still pretty happy with it. I'm even more happy to see more in this space, because I'm just at the point of "do i stick with cosmos or do i start rolling it all myself" and god the leap is terrifying if you're thinking of exposing to the internet. I get it, but at the same time it feels like you're always one missed config away from a potential nightmare, and that's after the "welp guess this is my second job" problem.
ericfrederich 11d ago
I thought that Coolify had centralized auth.
eointierney 11d ago
yunohost?
KomoD 11d ago
These guys have been spamming issues in repos trying to promote this project and no disclosure whatsoever that they are associated with the project. https://github.com/search?q=%22cloudinabottle.toml%22&type=issues https://github.com/search?q=%22cloudinabottle.toml%22&type=i...
- edoceo 11d ago
  It's only 11 in the last 48h, on lesser known projects.
  - satvikpendem 11d ago
    11 in 48 hours is way too many and I'd call that spam.
    - doc_ick 11d ago
      Sounds like a fun llm that’s “fixing” things.
    - edoceo 11d ago
      Yep, sarcasm is tough via text. Oops. I should've done /s but it's too late now.
- asdf88990 11d ago
  Disclosure would be nice but 11-12 issues in entire GitHub is hardly spam.
- ball_of_lint 11d ago
  Looks like the account in question is deleted now - do you have the original username?
  - KomoD 11d ago
    adl-collab
- 11d ago
_ink_ 11d ago
Looks really interesting! I'd like to see immich in the available apps. For me the Auth part is not super important. But has it one-click updates?
ChaseRensberger 11d ago
a similar project which i think is a lot better than this (in fact it's so good i'm jealous of its genius) is https://exe.dev https://exe.dev. It feels like something that hasn't really hit the mainstream yet but I suspect everyone will be talking about soon.
- SparkyMcUnicorn 11d ago
  Closed source, solves a different problem, and just looks like generic agent sandboxes/VMs? What am I missing.
  - indigodaddy 10d ago
    You haven't looked closely enough
  - ChaseRensberger 10d ago
    i think you're right to call me out. being open source/self hostable is a big plus of this project. outside of that, exe.dev is a fantastic way to deploy pretty much anything; pay a subscription for total compute and distribute that among VMs however you would like, host your own stuff, as simple/as complex as you want it to be. just infinite versatility and a fantastic user experience imo.
malomalsky 11d ago
>claude in contibutors >python No, thanks
scosman 11d ago
Proxmox + community-scripts.org is pretty great.
djohnmustard 11d ago
Interesting project! I've found self hosting a lot more approachable with the advent of AI to help with inevitable errors. I run every new app in its own service account and as a rootless podman quadlet. There are three main difficulties that I come up against with every app. First is backups, or more accurately restoring data. My understanding is that just taking a snapshot doesn't always give you a working restore point because an app could be mid-database migration or something like that. Second is updates, and third is accessibility outside the network. I am slowly working on my own solutions, interested to know how you tackle those though?
- SifatAhmed 11d ago
  [flagged]
- evgenileonti 10d ago
  [flagged]
cynicalsecurity 11d ago
> nextcloud: slow and unreliable, and more enterprise-targeted now What a load of bull.
m-p-3 11d ago
> nextcloud: slow and unreliable, and more enterprise-targeted now bewcloud could be a lean alternative for home users if that's something you'd like to offer.
- epihelix 11d ago
  Has anyone else found NextCloud to be slow and unreliable? I've been using it for the last three years (switching over from OwnCloud before that), and it's never missed a beat. Straightforward to set up, decent linux desktop clients, has mobile support that's also been rock-solid, and basically does what it says on the tin. Doesn't feel remotely enterprise targeted to me either -- it feels very much targeted towards home users.
  - claytongulick 11d ago
    Thanks for bringing this up, I was going to ask the same. I haven't heard any complaints about NextCloud, they've added some enterprise features, but all in a positive way, from what I can tell, not detracting from home and personal use.
tamimio 11d ago
> coolify: hosts containerized apps, but every app is an island with its own login and little integration with the host or other apps. That’s not an issue tho, I want each application to be a separate login, so I can have one pointed to a different subdomain or domain not all in one login and location.
nepthar 11d ago
I have been working on literally this exact project for the past 6 months, down to the nomenclature used. Running into this on HN is… strange.
- yoz-y 11d ago
  Happens. Had an idea (simple and stupid one), built it (with LLMs) went to register the domain. Found out somebody had the same idea and already put it there :)
  - smalltorch 11d ago
    I've had this happen as well. Same exact name, and concept and highly specific application. It was extreamly niche too.
aperrien 11d ago
I'm trying to understand the difference between this project and FreedomBox. I mean it's great to have options, but have any of them looked over that way? Heck, FreedomBox is even built into Debian now.
yoz-y 11d ago
I think what this needs to be truly accessible by general public is a mobile app (most people don’t have computers) and to be able to deploy it (including setting up domains) from there. Payments would definitely be a problem because of the various app stores’ rules.
yoz-y 11d ago
One thing that I found LLMs useful for is devops. I had rather good experience using agents to setup and deploy own cloud, Jellyfin and co. I experimented also getting a VPS, just giving the LLM the ssh keys and having at it. It’s pretty good. If the AI stays afloat, then I think the future lies somewhere there. Not too sure about the security side of the things …
- dnugget 5d ago
  [dead]
- wiether 11d ago
  > just giving the LLM the ssh keys and having at it. It’s pretty good. I'm mostly fine letting AI write code because its easily auditable and you can follow changes through the Git history. Whereas, it you let the AI go free on a server, you mostly have no idea what it did and where, so it's quite hard to audit and even harder to try and fix things. So, unless relying on a declarative paradigm like NixOS does, I'm not ready to give AI the keys to my castles
  - yoz-y 11d ago
    Admittedly this was not my castle. More of a $1.5/mo shed that I got just to try this.
    - BetterThanSober 10d ago
      That's a cheap shed, what's the provider and spec?
      - yoz-y 9d ago
        I lied actually. (Misremembered) it’s actually about $2.15 https://www.netcup.com/en/server/vps/vps-pico-g11s-iv-12m-nue https://www.netcup.com/en/server/vps/vps-pico-g11s-iv-12m-nu...
  - walrus01 10d ago
silver92bullet 11d ago
Now the key question, can the hardware be made accessible to everyone. Its definitely an improvement to make self hosting software easier but the process of setting even a raspberry pi for an average consumer interested in self hosting is still a barrier. They probably will be able to figure it out via youtube and some reddit posts but there should be an easier process or way
- zplizzi 11d ago
  (author here) I am really excited to make pre-configured Raspberry Pis that people can just plug in at home, and have it work out of the box. It'll take a bit more work to make it seamless but we're definitely aiming in that direction. It's a shame how expensive Pis have gotten recently though with the memory shortage.
  - silver92bullet 11d ago
    That is cool to hear. I know lots of folks who would be genuinely interested in this who don't have the technological chops to set up a self hosted system. One angle i have heard is degoogling and having more privacy in their data. I am really genuinely interested in this venture. I had the same idea about a year ago but was not in a place in life to act on it. I think even with the PIs being expensive because of the people will still buy them. Especially if they are seamless or near seamless.
samhclark 11d ago
This is neat! I've been building something very similar for personal use. I may lift a little bit of the app manifest part. I'm a little surprised that there's just one backup app, instead of each app coming with its own backup sidecar. To backup Immich, for instance, requires coordinating between its four different programs. I guess I'll read more about how that backup app works too ha
thelastgallon 11d ago
We need gmail, docs and sheets replacements. With AI, maybe people can develop solid alternatives very quickly. And Linux phones. Trillion dollar companies try to extract more and more from us, the only response is for us to develop alternative solutions and continuously chip away at their strengths- what made them monopolies in the first place.
- smalltorch 11d ago
  Hey cool sounds like everyone's on the same page. Here is a start. https://gitlab.com/here_forawhile/tmailplus https://gitlab.com/here_forawhile/tmailplus
- xetifafa 11d ago
  I haven't used it extensively, but I've heard cryptpad is good.
Vineetyadav2 11d ago
the hardware is problem we all been struggling with
crossroadsguy 11d ago
> making self-hosting accessible to everyone This happens with making many small to medium level resource hungary apps, for personal usage, run on one VPS which is not a heady duty machine costing heavy duty money. I have tried this on similar machines 2GB RAM and 1-2 VCPU and after 2-3 apps it starts swaying like a drunkard in slow motion even in that SSH session. But at least this one seems to be better than something like PikaPods, in combo pricing regard (I am not saying one is generally better over the other), where the pricing is rather per app.
Kushvinth 11d ago
The unified auth + inter-app permissions are the real differentiator vs Coolify/CapRover-style container hosts. Data tiers (local DBs vs S3/R2 archive) also look like the practical way to make Immich/Jellyfin viable without giant managed disks.
edmundsauto 11d ago
I’m used to unraid for my home system. Is this an app that would run as a container across my jbod?
Panzerschrek 11d ago
Making self-hosting really accessible isn't that easy, even if it's easy to setup the server machine itself. One needs to make their server machine accessible to everyone, which isn't generally possible due to how networks work, one needs a white IP address and making sure no incoming connections are rejected by the internet provider. Also one needs a domain. Obtaining it requires some bureaucratic burden, costs money and pricing isn't always transparent. These barriers are high enough, so that common people can't create/host their own sites. Only skilled enthusiasts or professionals can afford having their own site.
- globular-toast 11d ago
  What's a "white IP address"? It is, sadly, more difficult than it should be, though. When everyone got online in the 90s they actually became bottom feeders and not true internet citizens. Not much has changed in 30 years. IPv6 is necessary, but the world also sucks now so people need to know what they're doing with firewalls etc. Domains are not too bad now, there are some decent registrars now like Porkbun.
  - Panzerschrek 11d ago
    "white IP address" is an address that your internet provider gives you and which is accessible from the whole internet, not just some address local for the provider's network and hidden behind NAT. Since IPv4 addresses are scarce, most providers don't allocate them directly to their customers. An unique IPv6 may be theoretically assigned to each end device and thus solve the accessibility problem for locally-hosted servers, but I doubt internet providers do this in practice and I am afraid that many providers don't support IPv6 at all.
    - globular-toast 11d ago
      That's usually called a public IP address, aka a real IP address. IPv6 works exactly how you describe, that's the whole point of it. No NAT, just IP addresses. Some gaming consoles use it for peer to peer multiplayer so it is in demand even by normies. One of the problems is competition is stifled in the ISP market, by monopolies and ridiculously long contracts.
mvdwoord 11d ago
"Forjejo"
harhargange 11d ago
I recently bought a motherboard for my first self made pc. Six to eight sata slots is already enormous and the fact that you pay once and use your hardware freely opened my eyes. I was paying a subscription for cloud 1 tb for a trivial service. I am now hoarding my torrents worry free and plan to convert it to NAS. However i do still use my onedrive plan shared with three friends for 10 dollars for sharing large files till i set up my own nas with a good permanent net connection. The other issue is that I’m renting currently and if I’m changing countries I’ll have to rely on the onedrive again
klntsky 11d ago
There is a bit more mature project that does the same: https://selfprivacy.org https://selfprivacy.org
- utopiah 11d ago
  Nice, and it's even supported by NLNet
- cheema33 11d ago
  selfprivacy appears to be limited to a handful of services. e.g. It is not clear to me if I can host postgresql with it. i.e. It is not a general purpose container hosting product.
- TaLiTr 8d ago
  I'd say it's similar but not the same. One thing I can see from a quick skim is that cloud in a bottle can be set up on local infrastructure, this requires a cloud hosted VPS.
globular-toast 11d ago
How does it deal with storage? Storage is always the weakest link in self hosting. Having a bunch of stateless containers is ultimately just a fancy docker compose file. Still valuable, but you need a proper story for storage. Ideally all storage would be on individual volumes per app and all backed up etc.
chicagobuss 11d ago
I'm confused, isn't a self-hosted cloud something like openstack or kubernetes?
- wiether 11d ago
  Like the real ones, digital clouds can take many shapes. Sometimes it means "rented virtual resources", sometimes it means "stack of intertwined services", sometimes it means "SaaS", sometimes it means "alternatives to SaaS"... Here it seems to be the latter.
ftomassetti 11d ago
Cloudron?
ashrodan 11d ago
I've been really enjoying exe.dev Instant spin ups and restarts Easy interfaces ssh web cli AI agent Integration aplenty
hirako2000 11d ago
Like pikapod?
bradley13 11d ago
Meh. Maybe I'm a grinch, but I don't see this as easier. I have a little NUC running Ubuntu. Putting services on it is easy: PiHole, OwnCloud, Wireguard, etc.
ahmedhossamdev 11d ago
I really like the design man!
bob1029 11d ago
There seems to be a lot of variance between stated and revealed preferences around self-hosting. It often seems like presenting the image of being autonomous to our peers seems more important than actually achieving it. It takes a lot of energy to replicate what AWS and friends have done once we factor in concerns like the passage of time and entropy. I've never been able to keep a media/NAS appliance alive for much longer than 3-4 years. Inevitably, there is some kind of catastrophic event and I have to start all over with new vendors, etc. Even without any data loss this gets old. I promise you get tired of this after a while. It might seem like that would never happen and then one day it does. You can get so much more done if you can actually afford to use the cloud. I have a really hard time believing that many people are genuinely winning on total cost of ownership with self hosting.
- hamandcheese 11d ago
  > if you can actually afford to use the cloud. If you are an individual and you want to store a media library, you'll go broke instantly. I have roughly 200TB of storage capacity, 100TB used, in my NAS. That would be $2300/mo on S3 before even getting to access fees and network egress.
  - bob1029 11d ago
    How are you backing up 100TB of data? Have you factored the consequences of catastrophic data loss into the economics? How much value would you lose if all your data was gone? There's no way you are consuming this much content actively. You could store all of it in S3 deep archive for $200/m (100TB) and maintain a tiny fraction in the standard resource pool.
- BetterThanSober 10d ago
  Yep, even with something like NextCloud or ownCloud it gets tiring pretty fast. I do get the appeal of handling everything on your own, but it also brings any of the downside of handling everything by myself. I just need a working cloud storage with sync, redundancy, and availability. Can I get it up to spec? Definitely but it will cost more both in time and money than getting OOTB solution. I gave up sync and availability for sensitive data to at-rest encryption. Mundane photos/documents can stay on Google Drive, for now. I wish there's a better solution.
tobi_bsf 11d ago
accessible self hosting is already here, its called 'claude' or 'codex' you basically start it and tell it what you need, dont even have to know any software names.
pjmlp 11d ago
Basically what we were already doing before Cloud took over distributed computing and grid computing as industry terms, Open Stack and a few others.
rckt 11d ago
Never thought that people on HN would be seriously discussing an obviously vibe coded thing.
websap 11d ago
> Apps are (rootless, hardened) containers, so it can run existing software with minimal changes - and in a reasonably secure sandbox. WTF? I’m selling you a car with no brakes but it slows down reasonably fast?
devkakadiya 11d ago
[dead]
devkakadiya 11d ago
[dead]
28304283409234 11d ago
> Rent a box from whoever you like, and turn it into your own personal cloud. Yeah, that’s not what cloud computing is.
- gblargg 10d ago
  Yeah, I'm thinking that a cloud isn't just a server, it's a bunch of them spread out. We had servers on the Internet before cloud computing.
stiray 11d ago
Found this and never looked anywhere after: https://github.com/opencloud-eu/opencloud https://github.com/opencloud-eu/opencloud golang.
yuxinking 11d ago
[flagged]
arthurpatch 11d ago
[flagged]
gitowiec 11d ago
App catalog looks good, but they miss Home Assistant which is a major inconvenience
stefandesu 11d ago
> 53 is required because instance runs its own authoritative DNS server. Are you planning to offer alternative solutions for this, e.g. pointing a wildcard A record at the server running the instance? I'd rather not run a publicly accessible DNS server.
gpiechnik2 11d ago
i dont think i understand the idea of cloud in a bottle - it seems like overthinking to me
eemil 11d ago
So many docker app supervisors nowadays. I'm surprised there's no such thing as a self-hosted deployment spec. An opinionated docker-compose file (or similar) with well defined inputs, outputs, and requirements that works for the average use-case.
- synchrone 9d ago
  portainer.io has that, but an opinionated docker-compose is just not enough to provide a solid selfhosting app-berth: DB backups, volume management and backups, email, TLS certs, etc etc etc - so you need a superset
Jnr 11d ago
In the age of LLM agents, still going for Docker/Podmam on anything besides local development box seems like a weird choice. Docker has poor tooling for network level security between the containers, has issues with different runtimes per container, etc. It is just a bit primitive if you want to expose multiple services to the internet on the same server. One of those apps will get compromised and then all the others will follow. If you want a decent self hosted server, ask your frontier LLM agent of choice to configure kubernetes (on something like k3s) with mandatory userns mapping so nothing runs as root on the host, default deny firewall so inter-container communication is as locked down as possible, and if your router supports, set up VLANs so none of the containers can access your other devices on the LAN. Use something like backrest to handle backups, alertmanager and Grafana for monitoring, Keel for auto updates. Also consider separating ingress for public and internal services and use Tailscale with split DNS to acces the internal entrypoint. Set up Crowdsec as WAF and subscribe to their free blocklists to filter out bots. Ask it to set this all up using Ansible, so it can be maintained. While this would be extremely time consuming to set up and maintain by hand, an agent can do and test it in a few hours.
- hamdouni 10d ago
  Skip kubernetes and deploy to bare server
  - Jnr 10d ago
    Having separate bare server for each service would become quite expensive.
    - hamdouni 4d ago
      One can have multiple services on one server, using a reverse proxy to distribute trafic.
- crabmusket 10d ago
  > has issues with different runtimes per container Could you be more specific about that? > One of those apps will get compromised and then all the others will follow... Per their security docs, containers are rootless but I don't see anything about VLAN isolation. https://cloudinabottle.org/docs/how_it_works/security.html https://cloudinabottle.org/docs/how_it_works/security.html
eastbound 10d ago
It's sad that open source / open-internet projects always have a clunky design. Here, the main screenshot, at the top, uses a monospaced System font. You might as well display a terminal and it's a wrap. To appeal to broader audiences: - You both need to trigger the potential OSS contributors, with references to Debian, Ubuntu maybe, and appeal to big donors, which is another topic entirely, - And ALSO have a design that triggers the broader audiences and therefore, very "turnkey", very packaged, very "Comment like and subscribe", one-click install on your NAS, etc. Privacy is then a characteristic but services are the real features.
jens_tlb 10d ago
Your headline is literally the slogan of Magic Cloud. It's been around since 2019, and does this "exact thing" - Basically, "your cloud, on premises" ...
gavmor 10d ago
If your "opt-in platform features" and "interface to allow permissioned access to data and capabilities between different apps" is more expressive/discoverable than eg Cloud Foundry's "Service Broker" approach[0], then I am pretty excited! I run a lot of disparate services which don't interoperate except through explicit workflow automation pipelines (I use ConcourseCI to eg upload images to Immich [1] albums, but others might use n8n[2] for the same purpose). The "workflow automation" approach is a lot of resource overhead and broker-config maintainance, but my kingdom to be able to arbitrarily compose apps' states, eg commutimemap.com + Craigslist. 0. https://www.cloudfoundry.org/technology/open-service-broker-api/ https://www.cloudfoundry.org/technology/open-service-broker-... 1. https://github.com/gavmor/immich-concourse-resource https://github.com/gavmor/immich-concourse-resource 2. n8n.io
educar 10d ago
Surprised to not mention Cloudron in the alternative list. Probably the biggest player in this space
earth-tattoo 10d ago
[flagged]
jiaosdjf 10d ago
The cloud space is absurd, we've sat by for 2 decades while the likes of AWS define every aspect of deployment, auth, even containerisation. Containerisation was supposed to mean host anywhere, literally redeploy a complex set of services and their connections on any cloud provider at the drop of a hat. That is what a f**ing shipping container is, you rock up to any port in the world and the same container is lifted by any crane onto any ship or truck. Amazon, Google, Microsoft - these people have sold vendor lock-in to the very segment of tech society that should have been fighting it tooth and nail. 20 years ago you ftp'd some PHP files and it just worked, now you have to figure out 20 IAM profiles and shit your files across buckets because everything must be 1000000x scalable out of the box. No joke I was building a static firebase site the other day and just wanted a simple way to password protect it (like http auth) for staging so my client could see it - of all the useless shit firebase tries to lock you into they can't even do something as simple as basic http auth without a shit show and spinning up a cloud run instance or something to check a static password. Yes we 100% need fix hosting, everything should be portable, simple, generic.
- walrus01 10d ago
  If you don't mind me asking a question to better understand your perspective: Are you old enough to have personally experienced and built self-hosted things before the advent of AWS, cloud hosted stuff, or is your text above (which I do not disagree with in any way) the point of view of a person who began working on this stuff in the "cloud-native" era, post-2012 or around then? I'm thinking from the "20 years ago" it is the first one, so your experience is even more valuable for those younger persons reading it because you've seen how things were before the vendor-lock-in era began. I ask because I've been seeing an increasing trend of people who've self-taught themselves Linux/BSD things, grew up in the cloud-native era, and have now become increasing dissatisfied with the "Do everything in one vendor cloud" operations model that they initially learned. Many are now going the opposite direction and deciding to self host their own projects at much lower cost and much less vendor lock-in.
  - dgellow 10d ago
    Yeah, self-hosting is definitely having a come back. Lots of content creators who would have been evangelizing cloud solutions in the past have been instead going into the various self hosting rabbit holes. There is a bit of a pendulum swing. You now have access to so much information and tooling to host your own things, it’s pretty awesome compared to what we had before 2010. Not sure how much impact that will have for companies, that will likely stay more niche. Companies will still want to delegate much of the effort to a cloud provider, but with pressure to have less lock-in
pglwrt861 10d ago
[flagged]
tgsovlerkhgsel 10d ago
This is a great idea and I wish it success. Self-hosting shouldn't be a nightmare of researching and setting up 20 different applications. Is there something similar in progress for a "tech company tech stack"? As in, rather than trying to assemble your own custom infrastructure by finding an RPC system, permissions/group manager, credential management, storage, database, service discovery, job management, monitoring etc. one "opinionated" stack that you can easily deploy, as long as you're OK accepting their choices, with all these parts already bundled and wired up.
- lupire 10d ago
  Ruby ln Rails and are you sure you need all that? Do you have dozens of interrelated products with a billion users for each?
  - tgsovlerkhgsel 10d ago
    Ruby/RoR doesn't really solve the e.g. monitoring problem, does it? My goal is something that would work for startups that plan to grow beyond a single person/single server project. If you build the architecture for a too small size, you start running into walls as soon as you exceed that size. But even if you are small, you probably want some kind of Grafana/Prometheus monitoring to tell you what's breaking. You want your framework pre-wired so it automatically reports data (e.g. requests/failures per service) without you having to set it up, because it it isn't automatic, you probably won't get around to setting it up until it's too late. You also want some kind of build system, CI/CD to handle deployment. An easy way to set up staging environments would be nice. If you don't want to use a hosted forge, then a self-hosted forge connected into all this. My idea is to have one somewhat commonly adopted stack, where most of the stack "self-deploys" so you don't have to set up, connect, and coddle all of these services. If you want to deploy something within the stack, you're somewhat limited because you have to do it "the stack's way", but in exchange, once you've set it up, adding a staging environment consists of not actively disabling the default staging environment that the stack would set up for you otherwise, and once you've deployed your service, it's already pre-wired into your monitoring. Popular packages would then over time likely get packaged for this stack, with service-specific monitoring exports (e.g. the postgres container could export query details rather than just the default-collected values like CPU usage and requests-through-the-standardized-RPC-framework).
SeriousM 10d ago
What's wrong with coolify? Their ecosystem help start a service with pretty much zero issues. And they also show that maintaining a large amount of click-n-deploy services can't keep up with the releases of all of them. They hit the sweet spot of having everything in a second and maintaining it with ease over time.
huksley 10d ago
You don't need docker anymore - it is safe and fast to deploy as systemd services. And yeah AWS and the likes made for big money spenders with gigantic DevOps teams, not one person handling everything. We at DollarDeploy were advocating that for 95% of your usage needs you don't need anything but one server and if outgrow it just switch to a bigger one. I think one cloud in a bottle should be solved differently - apps deployed independently but additional thin layer for MDM - so logins and core data is at one place. Imagine if your self hosted wordpress, outline, nextcloud and etc share same logins and access levels, bootstrapped with same information without the need to type it for every app.
dugite-code 10d ago
Between podman docker and general VM's there hasn't been a better time to be selfhosting. I tend to find any abstractions on top of this to be quite limiting and difficult to extricate yourself once something goes wrong.
nseskin 10d ago
Are there currently any per-app CPU or memory limits? If not, could an app with a memory leak or high CPU usage affect the entire server and other applications? Are there any plans to enforce resource limits using Podman/cgroups?
cjblomqvist 10d ago
Another similar offering: https://runtipi.io/ https://runtipi.io/
- 1shooner 10d ago
  I have runtipi on 2 homeservers, and fully recommend it. It is not like Coolify, which feels like a mini cloud provider control plane. Runtipi is like an app store. You can load your own app definitions side-by-side with the centrally provided store. Once you have that set up, it's a quick Claude task to translate almost any selfhosted project into a simple click-to-install app through the UI.
mitchitized 10d ago
Poking around and have to ask an obvious question: What's the difference between this and Canonical's Juju from twenty years ago? Isn't this just the same thing, but with newer tools?
hnacobsxph 10d ago
[flagged]
kombine 10d ago
I'm running my homelab on NixOS with systemd containers, which I admit isn't for everyone. Still, I think it's a better base than Ubuntu.
jdcaron 10d ago
Congratulations on the launch, I 100% agree with your vision: > run on your instance (it's really easy!) I silently published AliaJS a year ago, since it's still in alpha in my opinion., But I keep releasing improvements, coming in the next few days, a one liner CLI turnkey quickstart script: `npx aliajs new`. I'll also provide a clickable user interface (Electron app). This is exciting, happy to see where the community is going with cloud tools that empower the individual actors.
swiftcoder 10d ago
I'm glad to see this, auth in particular is a real sore spot in self-hosting. In terms of the available integrations, Home Assistant feels like a big missing item - it's the core of many folks home server deployments.
- ajayvk 10d ago
  I have been building https://github.com/openrundev/openrun https://github.com/openrundev/openrun which makes auth (OIDC/SAML) with RBAC easy for self-hosted apps.
_pdp_ 10d ago
Great initiative. Also add https://github.com/chatbotkit/platform https://github.com/chatbotkit/platform ...if it fit the project direction. It is basically a sovereign AI platform for agent orchestration and automation and app building.
mawise 10d ago
This isn't the hard part of self-hosting, at least not anymore. In the comments here there are lots of examples of similar projects that solve basically the same problem (app selection and deployment). To make self-hosting "easy" we need to solve domain registration, DNS management, and port-forwarding configuration. This probably requires a project more like OpenWRT that includes an API-driven relationship with a registrar. The lack of a standard (consumer accessible) domain registration API is a huge hole in automating this. If such a project gets some traction, then it could migrate to a physical router that prospective self-hosters could buy. With domain registration, DNS management, and port forwarding all in the router's software, then the remaining hard parts can be sufficiently automated to make self hosting accessible to the average gaming console owner.
- penglish1 6d ago
  I agree and disagree. Easy management of server apps IS a hard part. Domain registration, DNS management and port-forwarding are ALSO hard parts. For 99.99% of the humans on earth, their primary computer is a smartphone. Anything that they can't do with a smartphone-like interface is hard, bordering on impossible. Even on the smartphone, there is a huge app complexity hurdle - sure some folks will use complex apps, but most people won't go much further in complexity than a subset of the apps that come with their phone. They'll add apps because it is easy, but they won't actually use apps that are too hard for them to use. These days, those same majority of the population might be annoyed at having to use an app to manage their wireless headphones, printers, smart appliances etc etc.. but they WILL do it. And they CAN do it. Effectively all of those devices are technically servers too. Back in my youth, we'd call a printer connected to a network a "print server" and it was often a standalone device that connected the printer to the network. There is no inherent reason that managing a fairly capable server, backups, DNS, VPN tunneling, port forwarding etc can't be as simple as "a basic app." Yes - a lot of limitations on what is theoretically possible will be imposed. Limitations and defaults will need to happen in the background to keep it simple. But it can happen.
- jdcaron 10d ago
  Insightful comment I fully agree that the hardest part needs to be automated fully, there's plenty of DNS providers with API access so it can be done. Naming is oftentimes the hardest part we have in tech, I dream of a future we are more decentralized and we have alternatives to DNS to access ressources,see this great text by Andrew Nesbitt about the subject of naming: https://nesbitt.io/2026/03/03/package-management-is-naming-all-the-way-down.html https://nesbitt.io/2026/03/03/package-management-is-naming-a...
crabmusket 10d ago
Sandstorm had a radically more innovative model of hosting: instead of helping you host apps, each document was its own instance. This was really interesting, but as this article notes, did need deep integration with the apps. I'd be interested to see if your more pragmatic approach plays out. Being able to start by taking apps "off the shelf" largely unmodified, then gradually adding integration via standard proxy features, seems sensible. In any case, doing single sign on between apps is just a very sensible and worthwhile place to start.
bizcalclab 10d ago
[flagged]
dzonga 10d ago
with wasm and v8 isolates -- the world should move away from containers. you literally have a sandbox environment that behaves the same everywhere and is very performant. but I guess people don't know shit anymore since they delegated thinking to 'llms'
nbobko 10d ago
I am rooting for local-first approach [1] as a superior alternative to self-hosting [1]: https://www.inkandswitch.com/essay/local-first/ https://www.inkandswitch.com/essay/local-first/
KellyCriterion 10d ago
Raise your hand if you clicked here, because you thought/assumend, that the link is about Anthropic/Claude selfhosting, because you missread the first word in the headline! :-D
adeptima 10d ago
has anyone bothered to check the code, dependencies especially dockerfile and god forgive me performance of this project !? the pain point presented correctly especially comparison … but what about remedy? https://github.com/cloud-in-a-bottle/cloud-in-a-bottle/ https://github.com/cloud-in-a-bottle/cloud-in-a-bottle/
kaydub 10d ago
I'm just not understanding the point... Have LLMs just made it too easy to make new projects?
alchemism 10d ago
It is all fun and games on-prem until it’s time for the annual support contracts.
MetroWind 10d ago
In an ideal world where software is well-written, you don't need containers to make self-hosting easy. You just copy over the binary with some config files and run it.
zekefoppa 10d ago
Honest question - why can't I just vibecode a solution? I rented a $5 lightsail instance, and so far AI has been great at deploying individual containers, creating safe boundaries, letting them interact, etc. What do I not know that makes me want Cloud in a Bottle?
myappengineer 10d ago
[flagged]
halilBB 9d ago
[flagged]
Pushy 9d ago
I am moving to completely self hosting because of 1 thing. The availability of good fast cheapish home internet connection. Would never consider it while it was fibre to the node. Fibre to the home 1g down and 400 up for $150 aussie. Makes everything viable
pseudocomposer 9d ago
I don’t really understand the benefit vs. Kubernetes? Like, with modern agents and a generic Kubernetes cluster (and there are SO MANY providers), a good LLM harness can do basically anything you’d want to do, if you structure your work properly. And heck, harnesses like Claude Code have a phone friendly UI too.

653 points by zplizzi 11d ago

A bit narrow definition of a "cloud", no..? More like a microservice server on rails Bits missing from cloud being global CDN (selfhosted), routing, regional sharding, etc.

bitpush 11d ago

> In the pre-cloud days, open source worked - authors distributed their software, and everyone "hosted" it for themselves (i.e. ran it on their own PC) This is just rose tinted vision of the past. None of the software of the past had the capability, reliability or robustness of modern sass.

em-bee 11d ago
that statement does not make any claims about capability, reliability or robustness. the claims are rather cost and independence.
wookmaster 11d ago
I'm rather baffled by that statement, with docker its...as easy as its ever been
- lmz 11d ago
  "capability, reliability or robustness" has nothing to do with ease.
- gucci-on-fleek 11d ago
  Docker was first released 11 years after AWS though, so I'm not really sure that it counts as "pre-cloud". Regardless, I agree that Docker has made self-hosting stuff pretty easy, and arguably even easier than it was in the pre-cloud days.
marknsikora 11d ago
Yea. When people talk about how simple things were in the past, I think they oblivious to the fact we were all writing out X11 configs by hand and having them break in all sort of strange and interesting ways. Open source has always been very "I gave it to you for free, I'm not going to hold your hand".
- wizzwizz4 11d ago
  I've written X configs by hand, but only to get a few extra pixels of overscan. I've never needed to do this. My experience has always been that things just work. The UI has never been great, in that I need more explanation than the built-in manuals provide – unlike, say, Windows 95, where you can learn everything you need to know by clicking around – but it's not hard to avoid breaking things, and it's not that hard to learn to do new stuff if you have a good book (or, lately, blog post) to consult.
  - yoz-y 11d ago
    The amount of sleepless nights because an update broke sound, video or networking on Linux is uncountable. It was fun though.

EGreg 11d ago

How do I reach out to you? We're building something that you might want to be a part of. (The "Safebox" comes with all the software you need, and you can just clone its AMI on AWS etc.) Would love to have a conversation. If you want to message me, find my email on https://qbix.com/about https://qbix.com/about

drunner 11d ago

I think the time for this space is here. The appetite to depart from subscriptions and loaning your personal data to ad/ai companies is stronger than ever. Currently, a lot of this space is docker compose based and simply inaccessible to so many who may otherwise be interested. Whether or not it's this project or another, I hope something gathers enough steam soon to truly break the barriers to entry.

cube00 11d ago
> The appetite to depart from subscriptions and loaning your personal data to ad/ai companies is stronger than ever. Only on HN, the general public don't care, they don't even know the name of their web browser.
- sevenzero 11d ago
  True, most people get the full ad driven internet experience and it drives me nuts. Everytime I have to help other people with computer stuff I almost get an aneurysm when opening their browser...
  - vonunov 11d ago
    At some point I started just installing ABP/uBO without even bothering to ask/tell them, if I had the opportunity. So far my reads seem to have been correct regarding whether this would conflict with each person's typical web use, as I've never heard back about any trouble.
- myaccountonhn 11d ago
  General public is weird because everyone, yet no one, is the general public. Fwiw I've started to see a shift in many non-tech circles I'm a part of. Especially when you take the time to explain the problems. Many do care, they just aren't made aware of the issues.
  - edoceo 11d ago
    GP typically means middle of the bell-curve. HN visitors and for sure commenters are at the edge of that curve...3-sta-nines away.

joshmn 11d ago

An aside: Fantastico was such a wonderful piece of software for me to learn and toy and tinker with web stuff. I was so impressed by the simplicity of it. (I phased out of the shared scene a almost two decades ago; I guess everyone moved to Softaculous, https://softaculous.com/fantastico/ https://softaculous.com/fantastico/)

jerf 11d ago

"We (Imbue, the company I work for) also offer a managed version, which I think is really important to making this widely accessible - and it gives us a straightforward business model to support the project." Looking at your hosted page, I see no reference to backups. I see in your docs reference to backup, but you should definitely offer some sort of turnkey, appropriately-marked-up backup solution. Configuration difficulty is what kills self-hosting on the front end, updates make it hard over time, but when it all dies and then I have no backup is when I give up. I can't find any reference to disk size limits anywhere. Can I host Immich on this? Can I host my media server? What will it cost? Surely not $10/month for my media collection. I'm not a hoarder and mostly have stuff ripped from my personally-owned media, which limits the size, and you're still not hosting that for $10/month. I see you have Jellyfin in the set of apps but I don't know what it will cost. The CPU & RAM limits I understand from the deploy page. Oh, and I'm specifically referring to your hosted service here.

zplizzi 11d ago
(author here) Thanks for flagging, I should make this more clear. Our managed instances have pretty small disks (~50GB), but there's a way to link a S3 bucket to your instance to use for bulk data storage. Apps that store bulk data (like immich/jellyfin) should automatically put it in the "archive data tier" which can be configured to go into this S3 bucket instead of local storage. We're planning to make this (and backups) an auto-configured part of our managed instances - billed separately (so you pay for just the additional storage you use; cloudflare R2 (S3 compatible) at-cost is like $15/TB/mo so it should be in that neighborhood). See docs on how this works: https://cloudinabottle.org/docs/how_it_works/data.html#the-archive-tier https://cloudinabottle.org/docs/how_it_works/data.html#the-a...

pietz 11d ago

In case someone is asking: THIS is what a launch article should be like. 10/10.

0c3ca83 11d ago

It's weird seeing someone trying to promote self-hosting, while building everything with Claude.

ravenstine 11d ago
Does self-hosting need to be all or nothing?
- Forgeties79 11d ago
  I didn’t get that from their comment at all
majorchord 11d ago
"It's weird seeing someone pay for food when they have a garden at home."
- zdragnar 11d ago
  LLMs can be self hosted though. Using Claude to build a self hosting platform is a bit like telling people they should be vegan while you're eating a bacon sandwich.
  - TaLiTr 9d ago
    In what way are those remotely similar? Veganism is incompatible with bacon. You can self-host, and also pay for cloud services when they are better than what you can self-host. If anything it's like suggesting making food instead of getting takeout while buying bread from the store, because it's better than what you can make at home.
- 0c3ca83 8d ago
  It's weird seeing someone promote home gardening by selling grocery store products.
senectus1 11d ago
AI is a tool. the use of this tool to deliver something unrelated is... unrelated

Winfred-zz 11d ago

>At the core, it's just an Ubuntu machine with a web server that hosts a dashboard and routes HTTP(s) requests to containerized apps. So no fail over/redundancy? I think at minimum it should be two machines, so one can break. That is one of the important features of cloud applications as far as I'm concerned. You don't have to deal with the problem of a single computer breaking.

praseodym 11d ago
This also adds a lot of moving parts and failure modes. For self-hosting I’d rather have downtime on a simple system that’s easy to fix rather than a complex setup that stays up but needs more maintenance when some component fails.
- Winfred-zz 10d ago
  It's containerized. It's an easy enough problem to solve, if you don't want it complicated. Here's what I did with my own setup: Stop the containers at night, copy the files to a second system that's configured with the same containers and that can become the primary as needed. I already monitor my systems for health and backup states, so these would be added to that. But all that does take a few hours to set up. You want your backups regardless and you want to have some certainty they're working/good. It's a problem that needs to be addressed, even you are going to agree with me on that.
ball_of_lint 11d ago
As soon as you add multiple instances you have to consider concurrency for every app you add, which is a huge cost on the app development side.
wiether 11d ago
> So no fail over/redundancy? I think at minimum it should be two machines, so one can break. Do you have two instances of everything in your life? It's clear this product is intended for personal use. I guess you have a couch in your home. This couch can seat friends/family. Yet you don't have a spare one?

bo1024 11d ago

Cloudron does something very similar (I'm a user): https://www.cloudron.io/ https://www.cloudron.io/

cpa 11d ago
Indeed, been using them since 2019 and it just works.
educar 10d ago
Yup, they just released Cloudron 10
- deleted 9d ago
  [deleted]
- devenquan 9d ago
  [flagged]
mmlkrx 10d ago
Really happy with Cloudron as well. Have been using it since 2022 for a small business and personally. They recently added community apps so now there is an official way for the community to add apps that are not yet officially supported. Really amazing product and pretty rock solid have migrated a complete Cloudron installation from one server to another a couple of times without issues.
synchrone 9d ago
cloudron has that elbow grease that only comes from years of running a project with an actual community of real users: a solid platform featureset like backups, DB management or mail sending, but also addressing niche apps' needs like .well-known or custom ports, UDP, server certificates available to the app and not just on platform frontend proxy layer highly recommend!

andrewoneone 11d ago

seems kind of like https://caprover.com/ https://caprover.com/

VonGuard 11d ago
Yeah, but Docker Swarm?

skybrian 11d ago

This pitch is somewhat interesting, but, much like Sandstorm, browsing the library of pre-built apps kind of leaves me cold. It's too much like browsing a rather tiny mobile app store. There are maybe three apps that I might be interested in. Since we have AI now, I think exe.dev's pitch is better: they provide Linux VMs, a web proxy, and integrations. You can ask the AI to build whatever web app you like. I'd love to have exe.dev, but running on my Mac Mini.

dbmikus 11d ago
> I'd love to have exe.dev, but running on my Mac Mini. I'm working on exactly this bit (with some more tuning for messaging AI agents) https://github.com/gofixpoint/amika https://github.com/gofixpoint/amika Doesn't run on your Mac Mini yet, but should get that enabled either this week or next If you sign up (free) I'll send you an email when the "Mac Mini mode + full OSS self-hosting" is live
prologic 11d ago
What apps were you looking for that you wouldn't find in the catalog?
- skybrian 10d ago
  I don't really know. Maybe a continuous build server? But just because it's listed in the catalog doesn't mean it's the one I want to use.
imtringued 11d ago
Wouldn't it make more sense to just ask AI to generate the cloud in a bottle files for the apps that are missing from the library?

armanj 11d ago

systemd is all you need

INTPenis 11d ago
systemd and ansible
nvader 11d ago
And someone else's machine

redrix 11d ago

If this can largely automate the backup and update side of things, then it seems like a great middle ground for people like me: I’m trying to self-host as much of my stuff as possible, but don’t have time to tinker like I used to. Hence updates, backups (etc) fall by the wayside in favour of “set and forget”.

jasongi 11d ago

I remember back when I first got into self-hosting (over a decade ago), I had a Netgear READYNAS. People made a small amount of plugins you could install. But the CPU was ARM before that was cool (I think mine was actually SPARC!) so it was a lot of effort to get things to compile, so plugins were usually quite outdated. Then I decided to painfully break out of vendor lock-in, built my own NAS with FreeNAS which was all the rage (still attached to a vendor, but at least I could control the hardware). This was before Docker really took off - the plugins were installed in FreeBSD jails. It worked for a while, but again, plugins could be woefully out of date and broken, upgrading the OS was a pain and would break all your plugins. Through the 10+ years of this... I now follow two simple rules: - separate your network storage and application hosting. Yes, it complicates things a little bit with NFS setups but it is a forcing function for a more resilient setup - use the docker container provided by the maintainers or LinuxServer.io. Vendor maintained wrappers can be initially helpful but end up as a form of tech debt when they're abandoned or neutered - especially when they're freemium and the company starts looking to squeeze. The quiet part of self-hosting is that it shifts the responsibility of security to the user. I'm sure cloudinabottle has more sensible defaults than provided docker containers, or builds in reverse proxies etc, but I doubt they're offering to take on liability for data loss or breaches. The problem I see you'll face are two-fold: 1. Projects like this have the power users self-select away from it and those who need a lot of hand-holding to self-select into it. If I know how to configure and deploy a docker container already I have no incentive to contribute. ReadyNAS got around this by having folks charge for their plugins (that were just OSS projects packaged up for their OS) but then it ruins the appeal, they likely only got away with it because they were only a couple of bucks and you were already locked in to the ecosystem via the hardware. 2. If the hosted aspect actually makes you money, required for the project to be continued long term, capitalism will ensure that incumbent cloud providers take that away from you by offering ready-made instances at your cost-price, like they did with redis, elasticsearch etc. Note that these are only issues if you're motivated by making a profit, or even a cost-neutral project. But if this is a charitable exercise backed by an entity that doesn't need the money, I wish you all the best - more things that let people dip their toes in are good! The cloud is all rent-seeking subscriptions and even with the recent supply shortages: fast, small, low-power compute is incredibly cheap these days, especially old business/mini machines.

passive 11d ago

I really like the idea, and I would like to see Tailscale evolve Aperture in this direction. Tailscale is already an easy way for anyone to connect their devices, which is essential for any sort of "personal cloud", and Aperture, while initially something of an AI gateway, is also facilitating connections to other services and apps. If you're building a personal cloud, you also want your AI connected to it, but probably with some degree of management. Aperture already provides a fair amount in this area, and probably with a connector for Cloud in a Bottle, could give your AI safe access.

hebetude 11d ago
Yep, tailscale, sync things. Glued together a lot of services

tesnorindian 11d ago

Reminds me of my old idea dating back to 2014 (https://linuxdreams.blogspot.com/2015/03/cloud-in-box-appliance.html?m=1 https://linuxdreams.blogspot.com/2015/03/cloud-in-box-applia...). Interestingly the blog is still active. I did a few pitches related to this at Nasscom Startup warehouse and IITM RTBI. Though this was welcomed by the panel members but it never took off due to lack of capital for such a startup during those times in India. I had to abandon and focus on my day job.

kolleraa 11d ago

This is a great project! Yes, the personal cloud is coming and it's going to be for everyone. I'm working on a project with similar goals but some different design decisions - instead of the typical containers I'm going for thin-client apps that hit a common data layer built on a fully serverless architecture. Not ready for production quite yet, but for those interested: https://starkeep.app/ https://starkeep.app/

anigbrowl 11d ago

How is this different from say Docker? I procrastinated getting acquainted with the latter for a long time because I thought it was more for industrial-scale infrastructure, but when I finally wound up using it I was surprised at how easy and low-maintenance it was.

ball_of_lint 11d ago
UI and UX. Auth. Out of the box apps get their own domain name. Try it out and see

deleted 11d ago

[deleted]

charcircuit 11d ago

No offense, but this is not accessible to everyone. Seriously, take a look at the setup instructions and tell me with a straight face that a 4 year old could set this up. https://cloudinabottle.org/docs/setup/shared_homeserver.html https://cloudinabottle.org/docs/setup/shared_homeserver.html There's no reason this couldn't be made as simple as double clicking a .exe and then the whole thing gets setup.

TaLiTr 9d ago
> Seriously, take a look at the setup instructions and tell me with a straight face that a 4 year old could set this up. It's also not accessible to people in comas, what's your point? The instructions are "import the file into VM software" and that's enough to get you something you can connect to over a web browser.

2OEH8eoCRo0 11d ago

I've been interested in something like this for awhile. Cloud or self hosting in-a-box. Should be simple for layman.

wmf 11d ago

Seems weird not to mention Umbrel.

6thbit 11d ago

Running the authoritative dns for the zone seems elegant, although wouldn’t that imply you absolutely can’t use cloudflare or similar services to avoid ddos/bots?

User95945 10d ago
[flagged]

rgun 11d ago

Great project! I have had conversations along these lines with my colleagues for quite some time now. Will definitely try. The docs mention cloudinabottle.toml but the app repos all have openhost.toml. Did you folks change the name of the platform? Also, can you point to how the unified auth works? Couldn't find anything in the manifest spec.

ball_of_lint 11d ago
Yeah, it was called Openhost for a while before changing to Cloud in a Bottle. Either filename works. It proxies requests from the user to installed apps, and adds a header 'is-owner'. Apps have to be built to respect that header - some apps do this by running their own little proxy/sidecar that will detect that header and inject saved credentials.

Eji1700 11d ago

Curious how this compares to Cosmos Cloud (https://cosmos-cloud.io/ https://cosmos-cloud.io/). I picked it a few years ago for much the same reason as anyone else (sick of this shit), and it's main attraction to me was it being a turnkey solution that focus security so i wasn't as likely to completely fuck everything important up. I think a "simple" installation package would be very attractive to most people, and while cosmos has a lot of growing to do in order to be that, I'm still pretty happy with it. I'm even more happy to see more in this space, because I'm just at the point of "do i stick with cosmos or do i start rolling it all myself" and god the leap is terrifying if you're thinking of exposing to the internet. I get it, but at the same time it feels like you're always one missed config away from a potential nightmare, and that's after the "welp guess this is my second job" problem.

ericfrederich 11d ago

I thought that Coolify had centralized auth.

eointierney 11d ago

yunohost?

KomoD 11d ago

These guys have been spamming issues in repos trying to promote this project and no disclosure whatsoever that they are associated with the project. https://github.com/search?q=%22cloudinabottle.toml%22&type=issues https://github.com/search?q=%22cloudinabottle.toml%22&type=i...

edoceo 11d ago
It's only 11 in the last 48h, on lesser known projects.
- satvikpendem 11d ago
  11 in 48 hours is way too many and I'd call that spam.
  - doc_ick 11d ago
    Sounds like a fun llm that’s “fixing” things.
  - edoceo 11d ago
    Yep, sarcasm is tough via text. Oops. I should've done /s but it's too late now.
asdf88990 11d ago
Disclosure would be nice but 11-12 issues in entire GitHub is hardly spam.
ball_of_lint 11d ago
Looks like the account in question is deleted now - do you have the original username?
- KomoD 11d ago
  adl-collab
11d ago

_ink_ 11d ago

Looks really interesting! I'd like to see immich in the available apps. For me the Auth part is not super important. But has it one-click updates?

ChaseRensberger 11d ago

a similar project which i think is a lot better than this (in fact it's so good i'm jealous of its genius) is https://exe.dev https://exe.dev. It feels like something that hasn't really hit the mainstream yet but I suspect everyone will be talking about soon.

SparkyMcUnicorn 11d ago
Closed source, solves a different problem, and just looks like generic agent sandboxes/VMs? What am I missing.
- indigodaddy 10d ago
  You haven't looked closely enough
- ChaseRensberger 10d ago
  i think you're right to call me out. being open source/self hostable is a big plus of this project. outside of that, exe.dev is a fantastic way to deploy pretty much anything; pay a subscription for total compute and distribute that among VMs however you would like, host your own stuff, as simple/as complex as you want it to be. just infinite versatility and a fantastic user experience imo.

malomalsky 11d ago

>claude in contibutors >python No, thanks

scosman 11d ago

Proxmox + community-scripts.org is pretty great.

djohnmustard 11d ago

Interesting project! I've found self hosting a lot more approachable with the advent of AI to help with inevitable errors. I run every new app in its own service account and as a rootless podman quadlet. There are three main difficulties that I come up against with every app. First is backups, or more accurately restoring data. My understanding is that just taking a snapshot doesn't always give you a working restore point because an app could be mid-database migration or something like that. Second is updates, and third is accessibility outside the network. I am slowly working on my own solutions, interested to know how you tackle those though?

SifatAhmed 11d ago
[flagged]
evgenileonti 10d ago
[flagged]

cynicalsecurity 11d ago

> nextcloud: slow and unreliable, and more enterprise-targeted now What a load of bull.

m-p-3 11d ago

> nextcloud: slow and unreliable, and more enterprise-targeted now bewcloud could be a lean alternative for home users if that's something you'd like to offer.

epihelix 11d ago
Has anyone else found NextCloud to be slow and unreliable? I've been using it for the last three years (switching over from OwnCloud before that), and it's never missed a beat. Straightforward to set up, decent linux desktop clients, has mobile support that's also been rock-solid, and basically does what it says on the tin. Doesn't feel remotely enterprise targeted to me either -- it feels very much targeted towards home users.
- claytongulick 11d ago
  Thanks for bringing this up, I was going to ask the same. I haven't heard any complaints about NextCloud, they've added some enterprise features, but all in a positive way, from what I can tell, not detracting from home and personal use.

tamimio 11d ago

> coolify: hosts containerized apps, but every app is an island with its own login and little integration with the host or other apps. That’s not an issue tho, I want each application to be a separate login, so I can have one pointed to a different subdomain or domain not all in one login and location.

nepthar 11d ago

I have been working on literally this exact project for the past 6 months, down to the nomenclature used. Running into this on HN is… strange.

yoz-y 11d ago
Happens. Had an idea (simple and stupid one), built it (with LLMs) went to register the domain. Found out somebody had the same idea and already put it there :)
- smalltorch 11d ago
  I've had this happen as well. Same exact name, and concept and highly specific application. It was extreamly niche too.

aperrien 11d ago

I'm trying to understand the difference between this project and FreedomBox. I mean it's great to have options, but have any of them looked over that way? Heck, FreedomBox is even built into Debian now.

yoz-y 11d ago

I think what this needs to be truly accessible by general public is a mobile app (most people don’t have computers) and to be able to deploy it (including setting up domains) from there. Payments would definitely be a problem because of the various app stores’ rules.

yoz-y 11d ago

One thing that I found LLMs useful for is devops. I had rather good experience using agents to setup and deploy own cloud, Jellyfin and co. I experimented also getting a VPS, just giving the LLM the ssh keys and having at it. It’s pretty good. If the AI stays afloat, then I think the future lies somewhere there. Not too sure about the security side of the things …

dnugget 5d ago
[dead]
wiether 11d ago
> just giving the LLM the ssh keys and having at it. It’s pretty good. I'm mostly fine letting AI write code because its easily auditable and you can follow changes through the Git history. Whereas, it you let the AI go free on a server, you mostly have no idea what it did and where, so it's quite hard to audit and even harder to try and fix things. So, unless relying on a declarative paradigm like NixOS does, I'm not ready to give AI the keys to my castles
- yoz-y 11d ago
  Admittedly this was not my castle. More of a $1.5/mo shed that I got just to try this.
  - BetterThanSober 10d ago
    That's a cheap shed, what's the provider and spec?
    - yoz-y 9d ago
      I lied actually. (Misremembered) it’s actually about $2.15 https://www.netcup.com/en/server/vps/vps-pico-g11s-iv-12m-nue https://www.netcup.com/en/server/vps/vps-pico-g11s-iv-12m-nu...
- walrus01 10d ago

silver92bullet 11d ago

Now the key question, can the hardware be made accessible to everyone. Its definitely an improvement to make self hosting software easier but the process of setting even a raspberry pi for an average consumer interested in self hosting is still a barrier. They probably will be able to figure it out via youtube and some reddit posts but there should be an easier process or way

zplizzi 11d ago
(author here) I am really excited to make pre-configured Raspberry Pis that people can just plug in at home, and have it work out of the box. It'll take a bit more work to make it seamless but we're definitely aiming in that direction. It's a shame how expensive Pis have gotten recently though with the memory shortage.
- silver92bullet 11d ago
  That is cool to hear. I know lots of folks who would be genuinely interested in this who don't have the technological chops to set up a self hosted system. One angle i have heard is degoogling and having more privacy in their data. I am really genuinely interested in this venture. I had the same idea about a year ago but was not in a place in life to act on it. I think even with the PIs being expensive because of the people will still buy them. Especially if they are seamless or near seamless.

samhclark 11d ago

This is neat! I've been building something very similar for personal use. I may lift a little bit of the app manifest part. I'm a little surprised that there's just one backup app, instead of each app coming with its own backup sidecar. To backup Immich, for instance, requires coordinating between its four different programs. I guess I'll read more about how that backup app works too ha

thelastgallon 11d ago

We need gmail, docs and sheets replacements. With AI, maybe people can develop solid alternatives very quickly. And Linux phones. Trillion dollar companies try to extract more and more from us, the only response is for us to develop alternative solutions and continuously chip away at their strengths- what made them monopolies in the first place.

smalltorch 11d ago
Hey cool sounds like everyone's on the same page. Here is a start. https://gitlab.com/here_forawhile/tmailplus https://gitlab.com/here_forawhile/tmailplus
xetifafa 11d ago
I haven't used it extensively, but I've heard cryptpad is good.

Vineetyadav2 11d ago

the hardware is problem we all been struggling with

crossroadsguy 11d ago

> making self-hosting accessible to everyone This happens with making many small to medium level resource hungary apps, for personal usage, run on one VPS which is not a heady duty machine costing heavy duty money. I have tried this on similar machines 2GB RAM and 1-2 VCPU and after 2-3 apps it starts swaying like a drunkard in slow motion even in that SSH session. But at least this one seems to be better than something like PikaPods, in combo pricing regard (I am not saying one is generally better over the other), where the pricing is rather per app.

Kushvinth 11d ago

The unified auth + inter-app permissions are the real differentiator vs Coolify/CapRover-style container hosts. Data tiers (local DBs vs S3/R2 archive) also look like the practical way to make Immich/Jellyfin viable without giant managed disks.

edmundsauto 11d ago

I’m used to unraid for my home system. Is this an app that would run as a container across my jbod?

Panzerschrek 11d ago

Making self-hosting really accessible isn't that easy, even if it's easy to setup the server machine itself. One needs to make their server machine accessible to everyone, which isn't generally possible due to how networks work, one needs a white IP address and making sure no incoming connections are rejected by the internet provider. Also one needs a domain. Obtaining it requires some bureaucratic burden, costs money and pricing isn't always transparent. These barriers are high enough, so that common people can't create/host their own sites. Only skilled enthusiasts or professionals can afford having their own site.

globular-toast 11d ago
What's a "white IP address"? It is, sadly, more difficult than it should be, though. When everyone got online in the 90s they actually became bottom feeders and not true internet citizens. Not much has changed in 30 years. IPv6 is necessary, but the world also sucks now so people need to know what they're doing with firewalls etc. Domains are not too bad now, there are some decent registrars now like Porkbun.
- Panzerschrek 11d ago
  "white IP address" is an address that your internet provider gives you and which is accessible from the whole internet, not just some address local for the provider's network and hidden behind NAT. Since IPv4 addresses are scarce, most providers don't allocate them directly to their customers. An unique IPv6 may be theoretically assigned to each end device and thus solve the accessibility problem for locally-hosted servers, but I doubt internet providers do this in practice and I am afraid that many providers don't support IPv6 at all.
  - globular-toast 11d ago
    That's usually called a public IP address, aka a real IP address. IPv6 works exactly how you describe, that's the whole point of it. No NAT, just IP addresses. Some gaming consoles use it for peer to peer multiplayer so it is in demand even by normies. One of the problems is competition is stifled in the ISP market, by monopolies and ridiculously long contracts.

mvdwoord 11d ago

"Forjejo"

harhargange 11d ago

I recently bought a motherboard for my first self made pc. Six to eight sata slots is already enormous and the fact that you pay once and use your hardware freely opened my eyes. I was paying a subscription for cloud 1 tb for a trivial service. I am now hoarding my torrents worry free and plan to convert it to NAS. However i do still use my onedrive plan shared with three friends for 10 dollars for sharing large files till i set up my own nas with a good permanent net connection. The other issue is that I’m renting currently and if I’m changing countries I’ll have to rely on the onedrive again

klntsky 11d ago

There is a bit more mature project that does the same: https://selfprivacy.org https://selfprivacy.org

utopiah 11d ago
Nice, and it's even supported by NLNet
cheema33 11d ago
selfprivacy appears to be limited to a handful of services. e.g. It is not clear to me if I can host postgresql with it. i.e. It is not a general purpose container hosting product.
TaLiTr 8d ago
I'd say it's similar but not the same. One thing I can see from a quick skim is that cloud in a bottle can be set up on local infrastructure, this requires a cloud hosted VPS.

globular-toast 11d ago

How does it deal with storage? Storage is always the weakest link in self hosting. Having a bunch of stateless containers is ultimately just a fancy docker compose file. Still valuable, but you need a proper story for storage. Ideally all storage would be on individual volumes per app and all backed up etc.

chicagobuss 11d ago

I'm confused, isn't a self-hosted cloud something like openstack or kubernetes?

wiether 11d ago
Like the real ones, digital clouds can take many shapes. Sometimes it means "rented virtual resources", sometimes it means "stack of intertwined services", sometimes it means "SaaS", sometimes it means "alternatives to SaaS"... Here it seems to be the latter.

ftomassetti 11d ago

Cloudron?

ashrodan 11d ago

I've been really enjoying exe.dev Instant spin ups and restarts Easy interfaces ssh web cli AI agent Integration aplenty

hirako2000 11d ago

Like pikapod?

bradley13 11d ago

Meh. Maybe I'm a grinch, but I don't see this as easier. I have a little NUC running Ubuntu. Putting services on it is easy: PiHole, OwnCloud, Wireguard, etc.

ahmedhossamdev 11d ago

I really like the design man!

bob1029 11d ago

There seems to be a lot of variance between stated and revealed preferences around self-hosting. It often seems like presenting the image of being autonomous to our peers seems more important than actually achieving it. It takes a lot of energy to replicate what AWS and friends have done once we factor in concerns like the passage of time and entropy. I've never been able to keep a media/NAS appliance alive for much longer than 3-4 years. Inevitably, there is some kind of catastrophic event and I have to start all over with new vendors, etc. Even without any data loss this gets old. I promise you get tired of this after a while. It might seem like that would never happen and then one day it does. You can get so much more done if you can actually afford to use the cloud. I have a really hard time believing that many people are genuinely winning on total cost of ownership with self hosting.

hamandcheese 11d ago
> if you can actually afford to use the cloud. If you are an individual and you want to store a media library, you'll go broke instantly. I have roughly 200TB of storage capacity, 100TB used, in my NAS. That would be $2300/mo on S3 before even getting to access fees and network egress.
- bob1029 11d ago
  How are you backing up 100TB of data? Have you factored the consequences of catastrophic data loss into the economics? How much value would you lose if all your data was gone? There's no way you are consuming this much content actively. You could store all of it in S3 deep archive for $200/m (100TB) and maintain a tiny fraction in the standard resource pool.
BetterThanSober 10d ago
Yep, even with something like NextCloud or ownCloud it gets tiring pretty fast. I do get the appeal of handling everything on your own, but it also brings any of the downside of handling everything by myself. I just need a working cloud storage with sync, redundancy, and availability. Can I get it up to spec? Definitely but it will cost more both in time and money than getting OOTB solution. I gave up sync and availability for sensitive data to at-rest encryption. Mundane photos/documents can stay on Google Drive, for now. I wish there's a better solution.

tobi_bsf 11d ago

accessible self hosting is already here, its called 'claude' or 'codex' you basically start it and tell it what you need, dont even have to know any software names.

pjmlp 11d ago

Basically what we were already doing before Cloud took over distributed computing and grid computing as industry terms, Open Stack and a few others.

rckt 11d ago

Never thought that people on HN would be seriously discussing an obviously vibe coded thing.

websap 11d ago

> Apps are (rootless, hardened) containers, so it can run existing software with minimal changes - and in a reasonably secure sandbox. WTF? I’m selling you a car with no brakes but it slows down reasonably fast?

devkakadiya 11d ago

[dead]

devkakadiya 11d ago

[dead]

28304283409234 11d ago

> Rent a box from whoever you like, and turn it into your own personal cloud. Yeah, that’s not what cloud computing is.

gblargg 10d ago
Yeah, I'm thinking that a cloud isn't just a server, it's a bunch of them spread out. We had servers on the Internet before cloud computing.

stiray 11d ago

Found this and never looked anywhere after: https://github.com/opencloud-eu/opencloud https://github.com/opencloud-eu/opencloud golang.

yuxinking 11d ago

[flagged]

arthurpatch 11d ago

[flagged]

gitowiec 11d ago

App catalog looks good, but they miss Home Assistant which is a major inconvenience

stefandesu 11d ago

> 53 is required because instance runs its own authoritative DNS server. Are you planning to offer alternative solutions for this, e.g. pointing a wildcard A record at the server running the instance? I'd rather not run a publicly accessible DNS server.

gpiechnik2 11d ago

i dont think i understand the idea of cloud in a bottle - it seems like overthinking to me

eemil 11d ago

So many docker app supervisors nowadays. I'm surprised there's no such thing as a self-hosted deployment spec. An opinionated docker-compose file (or similar) with well defined inputs, outputs, and requirements that works for the average use-case.

synchrone 9d ago
portainer.io has that, but an opinionated docker-compose is just not enough to provide a solid selfhosting app-berth: DB backups, volume management and backups, email, TLS certs, etc etc etc - so you need a superset

Jnr 11d ago

In the age of LLM agents, still going for Docker/Podmam on anything besides local development box seems like a weird choice. Docker has poor tooling for network level security between the containers, has issues with different runtimes per container, etc. It is just a bit primitive if you want to expose multiple services to the internet on the same server. One of those apps will get compromised and then all the others will follow. If you want a decent self hosted server, ask your frontier LLM agent of choice to configure kubernetes (on something like k3s) with mandatory userns mapping so nothing runs as root on the host, default deny firewall so inter-container communication is as locked down as possible, and if your router supports, set up VLANs so none of the containers can access your other devices on the LAN. Use something like backrest to handle backups, alertmanager and Grafana for monitoring, Keel for auto updates. Also consider separating ingress for public and internal services and use Tailscale with split DNS to acces the internal entrypoint. Set up Crowdsec as WAF and subscribe to their free blocklists to filter out bots. Ask it to set this all up using Ansible, so it can be maintained. While this would be extremely time consuming to set up and maintain by hand, an agent can do and test it in a few hours.

hamdouni 10d ago
Skip kubernetes and deploy to bare server
- Jnr 10d ago
  Having separate bare server for each service would become quite expensive.
  - hamdouni 4d ago
    One can have multiple services on one server, using a reverse proxy to distribute trafic.
crabmusket 10d ago
> has issues with different runtimes per container Could you be more specific about that? > One of those apps will get compromised and then all the others will follow... Per their security docs, containers are rootless but I don't see anything about VLAN isolation. https://cloudinabottle.org/docs/how_it_works/security.html https://cloudinabottle.org/docs/how_it_works/security.html

eastbound 10d ago

It's sad that open source / open-internet projects always have a clunky design. Here, the main screenshot, at the top, uses a monospaced System font. You might as well display a terminal and it's a wrap. To appeal to broader audiences: - You both need to trigger the potential OSS contributors, with references to Debian, Ubuntu maybe, and appeal to big donors, which is another topic entirely, - And ALSO have a design that triggers the broader audiences and therefore, very "turnkey", very packaged, very "Comment like and subscribe", one-click install on your NAS, etc. Privacy is then a characteristic but services are the real features.

jens_tlb 10d ago

Your headline is literally the slogan of Magic Cloud. It's been around since 2019, and does this "exact thing" - Basically, "your cloud, on premises" ...

gavmor 10d ago

If your "opt-in platform features" and "interface to allow permissioned access to data and capabilities between different apps" is more expressive/discoverable than eg Cloud Foundry's "Service Broker" approach[0], then I am pretty excited! I run a lot of disparate services which don't interoperate except through explicit workflow automation pipelines (I use ConcourseCI to eg upload images to Immich [1] albums, but others might use n8n[2] for the same purpose). The "workflow automation" approach is a lot of resource overhead and broker-config maintainance, but my kingdom to be able to arbitrarily compose apps' states, eg commutimemap.com + Craigslist. 0. https://www.cloudfoundry.org/technology/open-service-broker-api/ https://www.cloudfoundry.org/technology/open-service-broker-... 1. https://github.com/gavmor/immich-concourse-resource https://github.com/gavmor/immich-concourse-resource 2. n8n.io

educar 10d ago

Surprised to not mention Cloudron in the alternative list. Probably the biggest player in this space

earth-tattoo 10d ago

[flagged]

jiaosdjf 10d ago

The cloud space is absurd, we've sat by for 2 decades while the likes of AWS define every aspect of deployment, auth, even containerisation. Containerisation was supposed to mean host anywhere, literally redeploy a complex set of services and their connections on any cloud provider at the drop of a hat. That is what a f**ing shipping container is, you rock up to any port in the world and the same container is lifted by any crane onto any ship or truck. Amazon, Google, Microsoft - these people have sold vendor lock-in to the very segment of tech society that should have been fighting it tooth and nail. 20 years ago you ftp'd some PHP files and it just worked, now you have to figure out 20 IAM profiles and shit your files across buckets because everything must be 1000000x scalable out of the box. No joke I was building a static firebase site the other day and just wanted a simple way to password protect it (like http auth) for staging so my client could see it - of all the useless shit firebase tries to lock you into they can't even do something as simple as basic http auth without a shit show and spinning up a cloud run instance or something to check a static password. Yes we 100% need fix hosting, everything should be portable, simple, generic.

walrus01 10d ago
If you don't mind me asking a question to better understand your perspective: Are you old enough to have personally experienced and built self-hosted things before the advent of AWS, cloud hosted stuff, or is your text above (which I do not disagree with in any way) the point of view of a person who began working on this stuff in the "cloud-native" era, post-2012 or around then? I'm thinking from the "20 years ago" it is the first one, so your experience is even more valuable for those younger persons reading it because you've seen how things were before the vendor-lock-in era began. I ask because I've been seeing an increasing trend of people who've self-taught themselves Linux/BSD things, grew up in the cloud-native era, and have now become increasing dissatisfied with the "Do everything in one vendor cloud" operations model that they initially learned. Many are now going the opposite direction and deciding to self host their own projects at much lower cost and much less vendor lock-in.
- dgellow 10d ago
  Yeah, self-hosting is definitely having a come back. Lots of content creators who would have been evangelizing cloud solutions in the past have been instead going into the various self hosting rabbit holes. There is a bit of a pendulum swing. You now have access to so much information and tooling to host your own things, it’s pretty awesome compared to what we had before 2010. Not sure how much impact that will have for companies, that will likely stay more niche. Companies will still want to delegate much of the effort to a cloud provider, but with pressure to have less lock-in

pglwrt861 10d ago

[flagged]

tgsovlerkhgsel 10d ago

This is a great idea and I wish it success. Self-hosting shouldn't be a nightmare of researching and setting up 20 different applications. Is there something similar in progress for a "tech company tech stack"? As in, rather than trying to assemble your own custom infrastructure by finding an RPC system, permissions/group manager, credential management, storage, database, service discovery, job management, monitoring etc. one "opinionated" stack that you can easily deploy, as long as you're OK accepting their choices, with all these parts already bundled and wired up.

lupire 10d ago
Ruby ln Rails and are you sure you need all that? Do you have dozens of interrelated products with a billion users for each?
- tgsovlerkhgsel 10d ago
  Ruby/RoR doesn't really solve the e.g. monitoring problem, does it? My goal is something that would work for startups that plan to grow beyond a single person/single server project. If you build the architecture for a too small size, you start running into walls as soon as you exceed that size. But even if you are small, you probably want some kind of Grafana/Prometheus monitoring to tell you what's breaking. You want your framework pre-wired so it automatically reports data (e.g. requests/failures per service) without you having to set it up, because it it isn't automatic, you probably won't get around to setting it up until it's too late. You also want some kind of build system, CI/CD to handle deployment. An easy way to set up staging environments would be nice. If you don't want to use a hosted forge, then a self-hosted forge connected into all this. My idea is to have one somewhat commonly adopted stack, where most of the stack "self-deploys" so you don't have to set up, connect, and coddle all of these services. If you want to deploy something within the stack, you're somewhat limited because you have to do it "the stack's way", but in exchange, once you've set it up, adding a staging environment consists of not actively disabling the default staging environment that the stack would set up for you otherwise, and once you've deployed your service, it's already pre-wired into your monitoring. Popular packages would then over time likely get packaged for this stack, with service-specific monitoring exports (e.g. the postgres container could export query details rather than just the default-collected values like CPU usage and requests-through-the-standardized-RPC-framework).

SeriousM 10d ago

What's wrong with coolify? Their ecosystem help start a service with pretty much zero issues. And they also show that maintaining a large amount of click-n-deploy services can't keep up with the releases of all of them. They hit the sweet spot of having everything in a second and maintaining it with ease over time.

huksley 10d ago

You don't need docker anymore - it is safe and fast to deploy as systemd services. And yeah AWS and the likes made for big money spenders with gigantic DevOps teams, not one person handling everything. We at DollarDeploy were advocating that for 95% of your usage needs you don't need anything but one server and if outgrow it just switch to a bigger one. I think one cloud in a bottle should be solved differently - apps deployed independently but additional thin layer for MDM - so logins and core data is at one place. Imagine if your self hosted wordpress, outline, nextcloud and etc share same logins and access levels, bootstrapped with same information without the need to type it for every app.

dugite-code 10d ago

Between podman docker and general VM's there hasn't been a better time to be selfhosting. I tend to find any abstractions on top of this to be quite limiting and difficult to extricate yourself once something goes wrong.

nseskin 10d ago

Are there currently any per-app CPU or memory limits? If not, could an app with a memory leak or high CPU usage affect the entire server and other applications? Are there any plans to enforce resource limits using Podman/cgroups?

cjblomqvist 10d ago

Another similar offering: https://runtipi.io/ https://runtipi.io/

1shooner 10d ago
I have runtipi on 2 homeservers, and fully recommend it. It is not like Coolify, which feels like a mini cloud provider control plane. Runtipi is like an app store. You can load your own app definitions side-by-side with the centrally provided store. Once you have that set up, it's a quick Claude task to translate almost any selfhosted project into a simple click-to-install app through the UI.

mitchitized 10d ago

Poking around and have to ask an obvious question: What's the difference between this and Canonical's Juju from twenty years ago? Isn't this just the same thing, but with newer tools?

hnacobsxph 10d ago

[flagged]

kombine 10d ago

I'm running my homelab on NixOS with systemd containers, which I admit isn't for everyone. Still, I think it's a better base than Ubuntu.

jdcaron 10d ago

Congratulations on the launch, I 100% agree with your vision: > run on your instance (it's really easy!) I silently published AliaJS a year ago, since it's still in alpha in my opinion., But I keep releasing improvements, coming in the next few days, a one liner CLI turnkey quickstart script: `npx aliajs new`. I'll also provide a clickable user interface (Electron app). This is exciting, happy to see where the community is going with cloud tools that empower the individual actors.

swiftcoder 10d ago

I'm glad to see this, auth in particular is a real sore spot in self-hosting. In terms of the available integrations, Home Assistant feels like a big missing item - it's the core of many folks home server deployments.

ajayvk 10d ago
I have been building https://github.com/openrundev/openrun https://github.com/openrundev/openrun which makes auth (OIDC/SAML) with RBAC easy for self-hosted apps.

_pdp_ 10d ago

Great initiative. Also add https://github.com/chatbotkit/platform https://github.com/chatbotkit/platform ...if it fit the project direction. It is basically a sovereign AI platform for agent orchestration and automation and app building.

mawise 10d ago

This isn't the hard part of self-hosting, at least not anymore. In the comments here there are lots of examples of similar projects that solve basically the same problem (app selection and deployment). To make self-hosting "easy" we need to solve domain registration, DNS management, and port-forwarding configuration. This probably requires a project more like OpenWRT that includes an API-driven relationship with a registrar. The lack of a standard (consumer accessible) domain registration API is a huge hole in automating this. If such a project gets some traction, then it could migrate to a physical router that prospective self-hosters could buy. With domain registration, DNS management, and port forwarding all in the router's software, then the remaining hard parts can be sufficiently automated to make self hosting accessible to the average gaming console owner.

penglish1 6d ago
I agree and disagree. Easy management of server apps IS a hard part. Domain registration, DNS management and port-forwarding are ALSO hard parts. For 99.99% of the humans on earth, their primary computer is a smartphone. Anything that they can't do with a smartphone-like interface is hard, bordering on impossible. Even on the smartphone, there is a huge app complexity hurdle - sure some folks will use complex apps, but most people won't go much further in complexity than a subset of the apps that come with their phone. They'll add apps because it is easy, but they won't actually use apps that are too hard for them to use. These days, those same majority of the population might be annoyed at having to use an app to manage their wireless headphones, printers, smart appliances etc etc.. but they WILL do it. And they CAN do it. Effectively all of those devices are technically servers too. Back in my youth, we'd call a printer connected to a network a "print server" and it was often a standalone device that connected the printer to the network. There is no inherent reason that managing a fairly capable server, backups, DNS, VPN tunneling, port forwarding etc can't be as simple as "a basic app." Yes - a lot of limitations on what is theoretically possible will be imposed. Limitations and defaults will need to happen in the background to keep it simple. But it can happen.
jdcaron 10d ago
Insightful comment I fully agree that the hardest part needs to be automated fully, there's plenty of DNS providers with API access so it can be done. Naming is oftentimes the hardest part we have in tech, I dream of a future we are more decentralized and we have alternatives to DNS to access ressources,see this great text by Andrew Nesbitt about the subject of naming: https://nesbitt.io/2026/03/03/package-management-is-naming-all-the-way-down.html https://nesbitt.io/2026/03/03/package-management-is-naming-a...

crabmusket 10d ago

Sandstorm had a radically more innovative model of hosting: instead of helping you host apps, each document was its own instance. This was really interesting, but as this article notes, did need deep integration with the apps. I'd be interested to see if your more pragmatic approach plays out. Being able to start by taking apps "off the shelf" largely unmodified, then gradually adding integration via standard proxy features, seems sensible. In any case, doing single sign on between apps is just a very sensible and worthwhile place to start.

bizcalclab 10d ago

[flagged]

dzonga 10d ago

with wasm and v8 isolates -- the world should move away from containers. you literally have a sandbox environment that behaves the same everywhere and is very performant. but I guess people don't know shit anymore since they delegated thinking to 'llms'

nbobko 10d ago

I am rooting for local-first approach [1] as a superior alternative to self-hosting [1]: https://www.inkandswitch.com/essay/local-first/ https://www.inkandswitch.com/essay/local-first/

KellyCriterion 10d ago

Raise your hand if you clicked here, because you thought/assumend, that the link is about Anthropic/Claude selfhosting, because you missread the first word in the headline! :-D

adeptima 10d ago

has anyone bothered to check the code, dependencies especially dockerfile and god forgive me performance of this project !? the pain point presented correctly especially comparison … but what about remedy? https://github.com/cloud-in-a-bottle/cloud-in-a-bottle/ https://github.com/cloud-in-a-bottle/cloud-in-a-bottle/

kaydub 10d ago

I'm just not understanding the point... Have LLMs just made it too easy to make new projects?

alchemism 10d ago

It is all fun and games on-prem until it’s time for the annual support contracts.

MetroWind 10d ago

In an ideal world where software is well-written, you don't need containers to make self-hosting easy. You just copy over the binary with some config files and run it.

zekefoppa 10d ago

Honest question - why can't I just vibecode a solution? I rented a $5 lightsail instance, and so far AI has been great at deploying individual containers, creating safe boundaries, letting them interact, etc. What do I not know that makes me want Cloud in a Bottle?

myappengineer 10d ago

[flagged]

halilBB 9d ago

[flagged]

Pushy 9d ago

I am moving to completely self hosting because of 1 thing. The availability of good fast cheapish home internet connection. Would never consider it while it was fibre to the node. Fibre to the home 1g down and 400 up for $150 aussie. Makes everything viable

pseudocomposer 9d ago

I don’t really understand the benefit vs. Kubernetes? Like, with modern agents and a generic Kubernetes cluster (and there are SO MANY providers), a good LLM harness can do basically anything you’d want to do, if you structure your work properly. And heck, harnesses like Claude Code have a phone friendly UI too.