Cloudron 1.5 released - Log viewer, Overlay2 support, Flexbox UI & more

We are happy to announce the release of Cloudron 1.5.0

For those unaware, Cloudron is a platform that makes it easy to run apps on your server and keep them up-to-date.

Log viewer

We have added a log viewer to tail the platform and application logs. Adding this view is a step towards providing a graphical interface for the common use cases of the Cloudron CLI tool.

Automatic app log rotation

Cloudron apps are built following the 12-factor app methodology. Quoting the spec, "A twelve-factor app never concerns itself with routing or storage of its output stream. It should not attempt to write to or manage logfiles. Instead, each running process writes its event stream, unbuffered, to stdout.".

Unfortunately, it is hard to get all apps to log to stdout and some of them can log only to files. For, this reason, we have settled on a approach to make them log into /run. The platform automatically rotates logs so that the app doesn't have to.

apt upgrade warning

Security is a core feature of the Cloudron and we continue to push out updates to tighten the Cloudron's security policy. Our goal is that Cloudron users should be able to rely on Cloudron being secure out of the box without having to do manual configuration.

Cloudron implements best security practices out of the box including automatic ubuntu security updates, rate limits, password restrictions, blacklist checks, app sandboxing and more.

This approach to security means that Cloudron is tested and released with specific versions of system libraries. System apps are carefully configured and the Cloudron code relies on these configurations be in place (if we could make the rootfs readonly, we would!). With this in mind, Cloudron admins will now see the following message when logging in via SSH:

                    NOTE TO CLOUDRON ADMINS
                    -----------------------
Please do not run apt upgrade manually as it will update packages that
Cloudron relies on and may break your installation. Ubuntu security updates
are automatically installed on this server every night.

Read more at https://cloudron.io/documentation/security/#os-updates

Overlay2 support

Cloudron now configures docker to use the overlay2 storage driver. Switching to overlay2 will bring stability and improved performance.

Note that existing Cloudrons will continue to use the devicemapper backend. We will push out an update at some point that migrates old Cloudrons as well.

Flexbox UI

As we add more complex views to the Cloudron UI, we are outgrowing Bootstrap's grid system. To this end, we have started moving toward using flex box. The new UI ensures the navbar is always accessible and removes margins on mobile.

(On a side note, we have found flex box to be a very nice and simple layout system! Highly recommend it.)

Other bug fixes

• Update node to 6.11.2
• Collect disk usage statistics of all mounted disks. In the future, we will display this information in the UI.