I came on this thread to figure out why this wasn’t updating, and am both sad but also not surprised to see the reason none of my apps have updated in 7+ days.
This thread, to me, is yet another example of TN/ix making their community users (who they literally would not have a service to sell without) as second hand users.
I’ll say what I’ve said before. I get TrueNAS is a business, I get you need to make money, I get you have a board to answer to and profits to make.
What frustrates me and it seems like many others, is that TrueNAS continues to ignore the needs of the community who not only they built their entire business from, but also continue to contribute in ways that I can almost guarantee have allowed them to increase their revenue and profits. You would think having more than one person in such a critical role (app updates are critical, especially when you consider security updates and SEVs) would be the right business decision, but I am sadly unsurprised that TN leadership is yet again putting things for their community users on the back burner.
Also, “anyone can contribute and help maintain” is not a valid solution. I would accept this answer if TN was 100% an open source project that was surviving solely on PRs and donations, but TN is a for-profit org. You could absolutely put more than one person on this, but choosing not to and stating “if you want updates, do it yourself”, which is essentially what you are saying here, is dismissive yet again of your community users.
Another sad response from TN, but no longer surprising as you all have shown time and time again in the last year that your community users are second, despite them being what the entire product is built on and, in many ways, continues to grow because of. I’m not saying you’ve gone completely off of this, obviously the product still being available and you still have forums where we can express our opinions is indicative of this not being the case, but that doesn’t mean we can’t criticize the way you all have been handing community response as of late.
Ultimately there are positives and negatives for converting to a custom app (or starting there, for that matter), including the inability to convert back without removing and reinstalling the application.
I think the important takeaway is to have someone at TrueNAS/IX take a few minutes and post something in the README.md on that repo, making clear that the repo is intended to be “community-driven” and that you are actively looking for maintainers to assist. Follow that up with what you’re looking for in a maintainer (experience, skills, etc) and how to express interest.
Right now, aside from the odd forum post here, I don’t think the community knows or understands the expectations for repo/apps maintenance.
I’m also waiting on several apps to be updated. Is there a way to convert an app installed from the catalog into an docker compose file so I can modify it to pull from the upstream repo? If so, I’ll just stop using the app catalog if there is only one person maintaining it at IX systems.
Kris,
I’d be willing to help maintain. If there is some sort of enablement or documentation that Truenas / IX uses for its maintainers to follow, I’d be happy to read up and start helping.
Yes, if you convert it to a custom app. If you edit the custom app you have access to the compose file in an editor and can change things. But it’s a one way street. You can’t convert it back and have to maintain the app yourself after converting it
to add on to “Not-Reversible” it is also a different setup (or, more complicated setup) to a converted custom app vs what you see in docker or docker compose. you are going to see a LOT of things that look… way off. their way of ingressing everything is just differnt from docker compose…
ALSO, IF you convert to custom, change 1 thing at a time when messing with the custom app compose style. it’s super easy to go from perfectly working to borked to crap with a “-” 1 space in the wrong direction.
Just a YMMV heads up.
OpenMediaVault is a pretty decent alternative. i feel like TN is more polished a product though. And OMV doesnt have native ZFS support (you can use a plugin). But, if you can lose the interface, theres nothing i can think of that TN can do that OMV cant.
I DID leave TN for about 2 years becasue of their lack of give a crap about us, their product… and i used OMV that whole time. I came back becasue i like the TN interface, i feel like i have more granular control with TN… i wish TN would let us do just full out docker compose natively rather than doing the gooberish way its set up now. Oh, also… they dont like it when you complain. Or when you call people out on their stupidity (TN that is) they get super butthurt super easy (like, ill probably catch a time out for calling them cucks, or butthurt or whatever name is moist (i meant most, but im leaving it) derisive to their little demagogery. (Their people are why i left TN the first time, and will probably be the reason i test out unraid one of these days).
Do you by any chance mean the head maintainer of truecharts? If yes, rest assured, he was never a part of iX-Systems and has no say in the current apps implementation…
tnat does, indeed, sound like the meatball of which i speak. TrueCharts… I always called them TrueScale or something like that… never cared enough to learn the nomenclature they demanded we use…
Truecharts was a third party apps catalogue for the kubernetes based apps backend. And when they heard of the switch from kubernetes to docker stopped supporting truenas all together. The only way to run their apps on a truenas system now is inside a vm.
Since they were third party they have no affiliation with truenas.
And thanks Kris, for sharing the “how to get involved” stuff.
FWIW, I only run three apps from the ‘store’ - minidlna (since I can’t get it work in dockge), scrutiny (since I wanted to try a provided app) and dockge (since it gives me full control over app installation & upkeep).
PVE had full zfs support. And had a working support for VMs and has helper scripts to install apps.
I’m most bugged by the situation with apps when it comes to truenas plus the actions taken lately that clearly show home users are becoming more of a nuisance than an asset. That’s why I’m thinking about jumping ship.
If the apps situation was better or maybe even if we had something akin to helper scripts or just current apps running in containers, like we had in BSD days, instead of a mangled docker implementation, I might not be thinking about jumping ship, even with everything else. And I’ve been running my NAS with Freenas originally for almost 10 years now.
Thank you for this, but I have one recommendation. It talks about how to contribute new/updated apps, but not about how to volunteer (or the requirements for, or the need of additional people) being a maintainer, which is what we were missing the last few weeks.
For one, you can install apps with the “custom yaml” function: it opens an edit window and you can just enter the yaml code there.
Or you can install Dockhand, Dockge, or Portainer and install/maintain your docker-compose apps inside that.
I did both: I installed Dockhand with the custom yaml function, then all my other apps are managed inside that. The only real downside to this is that you can’t manage all your apps from within the TrueNAS UI, and need to keep a 2nd browser tab open for the apps.
