I had a chat with Boris at Fission and we talked about remoteStorage a bit, specifically the rate of adoption, the number of public providers (effectively 1), and how easy it is to setup a personal server. It made me wonder what the barriers are to having a one-click ‘deploy to heroku’ type possibility for setting up your own server. What would be necessary to achieve this for any of the remoteStorage server implementations? Is it just a matter of there being people willing to contribute code? Is the project still receiving funding? If there is funding, could someone be paid to implement a super easy setup?
I was recently looking into the Apache bug fix, which finally (after a decade of it being broken) makes Apache usable with RS, which would make php-remote-storage extremely easy to set up for people used to deploying PHP apps with Apache (or even complete newbies tbh). I have a draft document outlining the steps for installing it on Ubuntu LTS. But the Apache 2.2.47 backport still hasn’t been released.
I also agree that a 1-click setup would be a fantastic thing, and could be achieved with any of the existing server implementations using e.g. Docker Compose. Or you could indeed add some configs for Heroku and have a deploy button for that. (However, I think Heroku would be needlessly expensive for a single-user installation.)
There is currently no centralized funding for an RS project that I know of, but it shouldn’t be hard to find a few bucks in case someone wants to do this. In fact, Digital Ocean e.g. pay $300 cash money for contributing installation docs for FOSS server programs. (I’m willing to donate my installation notes for the above-mentioned Apache/PHP solution to anyone who’d want to deliver a finished doc.)
And if someone were to ask for donations for a 1-click setup, I’m certain their wallet wouldn’t stay empty. (I’m the first person to donate, if you allow me to use open source money, i.e. bitcoin.)
Side note
On another note, in a project I’m involved with, which is basically creating a federated Slack alternative, based on XMPP and RS, we have a budget for contributor grants, which we are currently experimenting with to pay out by size and amount of contributions on a monthly basis. The way it works is that contributions earn you a token, which is then paid out for by share of tokens recorded in the grant cycle. The end result is that you receive a small amount of open source money in your wallet, if you contribute to the project.
The co-operative also provides hosted accounts, and for our inevitable RS service, we have consensus on bringing Armadietto to production readiness and adding the features we’d need for our setup (e.g. LDAP). But we haven’t started on that yet, and thus haven’t announced it to the Armadietto contributors yet. This is mostly a matter of time constraints, so if anyone were to start working on Armadietto again, including just providing 1-click setup instructions, we would credit that for aforementioned contributor grant payouts as well!
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