[Proposed Work Item]: professional production Pod Providers

[ewingson]

intro

we have at least a dozen (if not several) working Pod Providers in the wild.
it is possible to log in with each/every (language) of them.
each has its justification.

possible professional production servers

I maintain NSS 6.0.0 on solidweb.org,
CSS 7.1.6 at solidweb.me and
Pivot 1.6.4 at teamid.live

after having gained bash/ssh experience for 7 years now,
I would like to move one (if not all) of them to a current Debian Trixie machine.

maybe it is out of scope for the CG, but some knowledge or support would be needed,
e.g. to enable an underlying nginx for Pivot, when trying to serve the 3 from the same root machine side by side.

due to my 9to5 in winter I can make it to the meetings at est. 15:40, in summer okay.

keeping them up and current sometimes needs severe improvisation.
time slot 4h/week + weekends.

info

https://gist.github.com/ewingson/c6e97a996aa51eac9f7fd1b7eaf14dc4
https://gist.github.com/ewingson/dbfee4d329c803aed0b0bd87e7a2fa00
https://gist.github.com/ewingson/2f92858f97e8043ded41cc87bc82b4d1
ewingson/solidweb.org#3 (comment)

cc: @kkuffour

[elf-pavlik]

@ewingson what would be the deliverable here?
Do you think few self-hosting guides on https://dev.solidproject.org/ with accompyining github repos, which could also be used as templates would work?

I'm currently working in building OCI images with Nix tools, running them with Podman and systemd on NixOS which can be bootstrapped with nixos~anywhere. I plan to write up something for the Solid Development Documentation and include repo with Nix flakes. My setup will use Caddy as reverse proxy which has build in support for creating and renewing Let's encrypt certs. https://youtu.be/N5PAU-vYrN8

@mrkvon how do you see this proposed work item overlap with Practicioners goals?

[ewingson]

end goal, deliverable, product : 3 websites/platforms/providers

broke down in smaller steps:

1. book the virtual debian trixie machine
2. assign FQDNs, setup webroot
3. setup letsencrypt
4. setup node/nvm
5. setup NSS, CSS , Pivot
6. configure the underlying nginx (e.g. http2 for pivot???)
7. setup pm2
8. migrate configuration ?
9. migrate userdata

see, if I look at my possibilities, they are limited.
but we do some sort of crowd stuff.
from the above, 6. & 8. are unclear.

communication, knowledge transfer can be done in meetings and asynchronous in issues/discussions.
we do development of solid, the product is on npm, I deploy it.

the deliverable (from solid => world) would be 3 pod providers.
the deliverable (from me => you) would be I document the whole process in smallest possible steps and publish documentation at dev.solidproject.org.

makes sense ? (my thoughts, no AI)

[elf-pavlik]

Thanks @ewingson
I would expect that as part of this work we will come up with few different aproaches to deployment. What you describe sounds like one of the options. Later we can discuss those different approaches, decide how many of them we want to put effort into documenting including differences between those approaches and some suggestions for why someone would choose one over another one.

[melvincarvalho]

I also run several pod servers and am supportive work on this topic

[mrkvon]

@mrkvon how do you see this proposed work item overlap with Practicioners goals?

Reliable open-source Pod hosting is an important practical topic, and a prerequisite of much of Practitioners' work. Personally, I'm sympathetic to work that Matthias @ewingson is doing, and I have previously written a CSS production setup guide specifically with intent to support these deployments.

That being said, I'm not sure whether the item itself fits within Practitioners' scope.

I've added it to PG meeting agenda, and on one of the next meetings we can gauge members' appetite and ability to support this topic.

cc: @jeff-zucker @CxRes

[elf-pavlik]

I'm doing more focused work on it at this moment, aiming to do the first deplyment based on Nix flake with Podman and systemd by the end of this week. Ongoing work can be seen on this branch (feedback welcome!) https://github.com/hackers4peace/sai-js/tree/deployment
My setup also has dev env with Docker Compose and test env with https://dagger.io/

Once I get it done, I would most likely be able to only participate as needed so up to 1h / 32h week

[elf-pavlik]

I hope Solid Operations Advisory Group members could join this work item.

• https://github.com/solid/odi-governance?tab=readme-ov-file#solid-operations-advisory-group-formerly-solid-team
• https://github.com/solid/odi-governance/blob/main/operations-advisory-committee/03-2025-nominations.md

@bourgeoa @thhck @renyuneyun