3rd party apps?

One of the reasons I chose NS7 over competition, was that it seemed very active in the field of 3rd party app add-ons.

I might have been wrong, because the last few weeks I use it, I haven’t seen anything done on this front. No new add-ons, no updates for existing.
Is this side of NS7 dead?
Are there any new add-ons under development?
Any of the existing planned to update?
Anything?

No. Examples:

As regards my modules I started wireguard some time ago but still not finished. :unamused:
You could follow the devs on github.

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Thanks.

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Most of the 3rd party applications are community driven. It might be a Mr. Obvious remark, but if you need a certain application added, feel free to get your hands dirty!
Don’t get me wrong, it is not some nasty remark towards you. It is the philosophy of the project! And be assured, you will not stand alone when creating a new application or updating an existing application.
We will do our best to support anyone trying to create/update a module.

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I understand what you say, yet not all of us can do that. :slight_smile:
(it’s been a while since I last wrote code)

That said it is not something specific I need and miss, it was more of a general comment/question, as it was one of the factors that made me decide on this over other open source solutions.
It seemed active then upon further digging it was way less than I thought.
Probably doesn’t help that there is no central repository used by 3rd party devs to list add-on apps in Software Center. 3rd party add-ons I found (maybe 20?) are using their own repositories that have to be added manually, there are no notifications for updates for them etc.
Maybe the backbone is there (to be listed in Software Center) but is underused by 3rd party devs?

Since we talked about things I possibly miss, what I actually miss from NS are mostly things for a next version NS, instead of add-ons (although I would love to be surprised and getting those as add-ons).

  1. A full DNS implementation.
  2. A proper CA.
  3. Better Active Directory implementation (possibly not in a container - although I know with CentOS this will not change).
    All these were discussed in their own topics in the past, so I am not re-opening them here, just listing them.

Anyway. Thanks for contributing to my thread.

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It is not and never has been the case that folks have been working on third-party software integration into Nethserver just for the fun of it–it’s been driven by a perceived need. That’s why I built my acme-dns and self-service-password RPMs, as well as automx. That’s why I wrote up the installation process for Phabricator, and documented using acme.sh and DNS validation to get Let’s Encrypt certs for internal servers.

If there’s a particular package you want, but don’t have the ability to package it up, suggest it. Do what you can on it. Are there instructions for installing it under CentOS 7 (that don’t require Docker)? If so, that’s a good start, and you’ll probably be able to get the app up and running with only minor modification. Or is it pretty much just a web app, using the standard LAMP stack? It’s likely pretty straightforward to install. Write that up.

Next, how is the app configured? Are there configuration files? Are there standard things that need to be defined, and can be expected (e.g., things like domain names)? Are there others that the user will want to configure? Work on templates for those.

Packaging the nethserver-appname RPM is probably the fiddliest part of the procedure, but one doesn’t need to know the app well in order to do that.

Now, of course, all this depends on there being an existing app that could be packaged for Nethserver and would do what you want done, and at least two of the three things you mention as examples really aren’t in this category. The “proper CA” may be, though I’m not really aware of a good candidate application (BounCA at https://www.bounca.org/ could be, though the last commit to the code was a year and a half ago, and its installation instructions claim to require nginx).

As you know, much of the development is community-driven. If you want something done, the best way to make it happen is to do it yourself. If you’re unable to do that, a detailed request (identifying the use case where it would be beneficial, the specific capabilities desired, and ideally a specific package that would provide them) is much more likely to get a favorable response than a one-liner that provides none of that information and just says, e.g. “can you add a map server to Nethserver?”. The goal is to get someone else who can do the work to see the value in doing it. Using the examples you gave, I don’t see any value at all in the first two, and thus would be unlikely to put much work into making them happen. I might have a go at getting BounCA or openxpki running just for the fun of it, but I don’t see me building packages and putting them in my repo. But I’m open to being convinced, as I’m sure are others more capable than I.

@stephdl and I, at least, include update notifications as part of our repo RPMs.

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Thanks for the detailed reply.
About the three “wishlist items” I mention, I said that there are already detailed threads.
I will find them and put them here.
That said, I already said I believe they need to be core functionality for a future NS, mostly because they probably need to be tightly integrated and used by other parts of core NS.

Yep for updates it is easy, you can check my rpm nethserver-stephdl to make it inside yours, it is just a cron done each night.

One of my mentor has said one day, if you want something, start to do it, this is how my code story has started.

Joke apart one of our responsabilities with @davidep and I is to animate, give support, help, push in the right direction the dev community. We are here for that, please ask what you need.

However we cannot do the job for you, even if I would love to. A community developer needs ideas, he needs supports, he needs tests, he needs love because all among this are done after his family, his job.

I think community development is not dead.

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About DNS:

About CA:
Implement Certificate Authority in Neth? (not mine)
Full fledged CA?
Real Certificate Authority

About AD/LDAP:
RHEL 8 is still lacking a Samba Active Directory package (not mine)
Better AD implementation
Can i set the LDAP server name?

Also my posts in NS8 thread:
NethServer 8: wishlist for the conference - #76 by NLS (and follow up replies)