Ask HN: Do you pay someone to install self-hosted apps?

Check out cloudron: https://cloudron.io/

I am actually building a self-hosted application and this is a really big question/problem. In a perfect world, you could go to any hosting platform and with one click you should be able to install any software you want (as you do on mobile with apps).

I am trying to find a solution for this, but so far most of my clients have at least some technical knowledge, the rest are a bit afraid, as you mentioned, to waste too much time on trying to install something.

I also talked to some folks at DigitalOcean to ask on an easier way for a developer to install the software for the clients, on the clients own DO account. Unforunately all the solutions they provided were either really complicated or involved access to the clients account, thus imposing a high security risk. I told them it would be really cool if I could send a link to the client that automatically create the server with all the configuration needed, without them having to press any other buttons or run any commands.

Slightly off-topic: What self-hosted analytics app did you install? You could also check out the one I built[0], I focused a lot on making installation as easy as possible.

[0]: https://www.usertrack.net

Don't forget that most Unix-like operating systems and Linux distributions use package managers, typically one installs the package then configures some number of config files to get the thing up and running. Some are working right after the install. The problem with packaging web applications is that most don't take into consideration things like File System Hierarchies and are very difficult to package. If you have any sort of application and want it to be easy to install, make it easy to package (even closed source apps can benefit.) or package it yourself.

Anytime I have to install some software (AWS' agents such as inspector and cloudwatch are particularly bad about this) and I have to extract some tarball or curl into `sh` I cringe. RPM/Apt/etc is right there, ready for you to use! Signature verification, config file handling, etc!

Hi, I have built a platform that performs all the deployment related tasks from provisioning the server, to configuring the basic firewall, installing the DB etc.

Would love to learn about your challenges and see if our platform can solve your deployment related issues. email: hello at deploybob dot com

All the steps listed on the url you shared can be automated and the platform can already do this. However, there are two issues: 1) Automated service is only available for DigitalOcean (DO) right now, so your client will have to choose DO as their infra provider. 2) DO does not offer granular OAuth permissions. In order to provision the droplet and modify the DNS records in the DO panel, the client has to authorize 'write' access. We do not persist the oauth token but for clients who are using their DO account for other purposes it can be a deal breaker.

Also, is it possible for your app 'usertrack' to read the license key from the environment variable?

Let me know if you would like to test this out. The service is in private beta at the moment.

-- The client will have to use the DO oauth to login, provide their ssh public key and the domain name. Everything else will be take care of by the app. It takes roughly 8-12 minutes to complete the deployment.