I am aware of that project but reluctant to use it because jails just work so well. Why re-invent the wheel?
I appreciate all your open replies in this thread, but please, you did not address my main concern with any app/plugin ecosystem - to cite:
If you want SCALE and apps to be a success, this is crucial, IMHO. And it's not about FreeBSD vs. Linux, not at all.
Kind regards,
Patrick
What's your idea for app life cycle management? This has been a sore point in CORE plugins for years and as I pointed out in no way rooted in the underlying technology stack. Users (rightfully IMHO) expect that if an app/plugin like Nextcloud exists and is touted as "official", after initial installation there will be timely and painless updates to it. Even more so in this particular case when the app's entire raison d'être is to be facing the public Internet.
Sorry, I missed that originally. This is part of the reason for us doing what we are doing in SCALE today. People may not like K3s, but the Helm charts we used for our App system have been pretty darn good. Its allowed us to for the first time ever properly support apps and their lifecycle in a much more controlled manner. Since SCALE debuted back in Angelfish days, I've personally been using it to manage my humble App "farm", and things have just tended to work. I have yet to have a single Plex update (Now Jellyfin) go bad, I just click the update button and away it goes. Back up in < 1 min or so. Granted its not perfect, we're always going to be fighting issues if upstream projects reorganize things too wildly with their containers, but for the first time it is possible to run an "Official" app, such as Nextcloud, straight from the source themselves, NextCloud. Those tend to "just work" as long as you don't go too nuts customizing them beyond what the container maintainers allow for.
Granted, I can't vouch for 3rd party chart catalogs, they will have their own issues based on how they decide to manage their own catalogs. But in our "official" catalog, we have Enterprise apps now, such as Minio and Syncthing. They have to "just work" with painless updates, which we've managed to do with our carefully controlled repo. Our
Charts repo even uses automation to automatically open PR's to Github when upstream containers are updated, so we get updates at a much more rapid pace than before. Additionally when a bug has been found, we've been mostly successful in resolving it for the user on the chart side, so that the App doesn't have to be fully re-deployed. That said, no system is perfect, and we're continuously looking at options to see what we can do to make it even more simplified and stable, so that App updates are 100% painless and allow us to get back to our busy lives as well. Speaking for myself, once i took the plunge and migrated my Plugins/Jails to my pretty standard Apps, it has been a huge timesaver.