Lifeboat - Deploy Xojo Web Apps Anywhere! Redirects, www, and Ubuntu 21 support

Rochester, NY – [I am] pleased to announce new features for Lifeboat, the server management software! Lifeboat was created to help anyone that wants to write a web app deploy a web app. This latest version configures redirects, handles www. prefixes automatically, and introduces Ubuntu 21.04 support.

Lifeboat makes it simple to deploy and manage Xojo Web applications on any Linux server. Automate configuration and let Lifeboat juggle port assignments, system services, and reverse proxy software for running a web app server. Lifeboat is designed to deploy both Xojo Web 1.0 and Xojo Web 2.0 standalone applications.

Just added, Lifeboat now enables developers to configure a www. prefix for domains with one click. The new Redirects feature implements HTTP redirects to point visitors from one address to another at the nginx level.

Lifeboat has been updated to work with the latest Ubuntu 21.04. Lifeboat can connect to and manage servers running modern versions of CentOS, Debian, and Ubuntu.

New: Support for Ubuntu 21.04
New: Handle www. prefixes with a checkbox
New: Configure web redirects without PHP
Fixed: PHP logs button now stays aligned
Changed: Improvements to Super Simple Sync

In addition to the Xojo Web specific tools, Lifeboat offers features to manage static websites. Install and configure SSL in one (or two) click(s) for free with LetsEncrypt integration. Serve static HTML or PHP files to offer visitors a traditional website experience.

Download and evaluate Lifeboat for free. For evaluation Lifeboat will configure one server, one web application, and one static files directory. A license is required to unlock these limits.

For more information about Lifeboat, please visit the website:
https://strawberrysw.com/lifeboat

Download Lifeboat and try it for free on Mac or Windows 10:
https://strawberrysw.com/lifeboat/get

Contact the author directly:
support@strawberrysw.com

17 Likes

Higly recomended, even if you are a techie and can do all this stuff by yourself, even then this is a HUGE timesaver, good work @Tim_Parnell

It litteraly took me about 10 minutes to have a xojo app running on my linode server, including seting up the server at linode

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Yep - highly recommended indeed. Takes all the hassle out of deploying Xojo web and other web pages on most any Linux server of your choice. Literally drag 'n drop and there you go. Fabulous!

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@Tim_Parnell can lifeboat work with DO loadbalancers? it looks like it won’t accept it when a domain is bound to a load balancer ?

For this you would need to configure each droplet individually. You would still need to configure a Domain, but if the DNS lookup doesn’t match the IP you’re connected to Lifeboat will give a warning. This is useful in most cases, but you can ignore it if you’re setting up load balancing through Digital Ocean’s service.

With this setup, we let Digital Ocean handle the load balancing features and SSL. You’ll set that up with Digital Ocean rather than Lifeboat. I haven’t tried out Digital Ocean load balancing, so unfortunately I’m answering this with information on their website.

You can disable the DNS mismatch warning from preferences, but I find the warning has helped me enough times to be enabled by default.

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Tim - for Lifeboat Load balancing, is it only effective if the host server has more than 1 CPU/Core?
( I am on one of the cheap plans on AWS Lightsail)

I have been reading up on Loadbalancing in this forum, but those discussions are back to 2014, and Xojo has changed a lot since then, including from 32 to 64 bit. Back then they said the Web app can only use one core, so on a dual system, then one could run two instances.

Hi Mark,

Running multiple instances of the same app on a single core system isn’t likely to have any beneficial impact. It forces the OS to cycle between more apps to run, meaning less dedicated time for each instance.

Xojo Web (and Desktop) apps are still limited to single core operation. On a dual core system with two instances running, it is up to the OS to decide which core is running which instance. It’s usually pretty smart about this, so one instance per core is the way to go.

1 Like