Rochester, NY – [I am] pleased to announce that Lifeboat has finally launched! Under development for the last year, Lifeboat is ready to help developers deploy Xojo Web applications. Lifeboat was created to help anyone that wants to write a web app deploy a web app.
Lifeboat makes it simple to deploy and manage your Xojo Web applications on a Linux server. Automate server configuration and let Lifeboat juggle the 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.
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 main landing page (or more!)
Key features developers will love:
Upload and configure web apps without additional tools
Manage multiple web apps running on one server
Easily configure load balancing to leverage multiple CPUs
Serve static files, images, and scripts for traditional websites
Automatically restart web applications that have crashed
Strawberry Software offers Lifeboat to download and evaluate 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.
Do you know what it would take to also support deploy on macOS? I have a couple of mac minis in the cloud I use for other things. If I could deploy a web app easily to them, my experiment with web apps more.
Currently have them running haproxy as the front end to Aloe Express stuff (among other tasks they do).
This is awesome project and helps Xojo to have a chance to get Xojo Web on the map. As often limited options for hosting it is what will take it off the table before it is considered further.
I have done some testing on Lifeboat and it is a very quick and reliable way to get your Xojo Web apps on a Digital Ocean server. No Linux experience required. Recommended.
Setting up macOS to perform of the same functionality is possible, but it’s different from configuring Linux or Windows. I don’t have plans to port it to macOS as a host at this time, but I could certainly be convinced to add things by contract.
@Hal_Gumbert wrote a little tool for launching web apps on macOS. I got permission to share his work. If it helps, you can download his launcher app project WebAppLauncher.xojo_xml_project
It doesn’t have the features of Lifeboat, but I thought it might help!
Thanks, I’ll take a look at that. Since I already have haproxy running and SSL taken care of to front end some Aloe Express stuff, I can add more lines to route to a web app. This may be enough to get me going to the point of experimenting.
Well done! seems you have covered everything. I have pretty much set up all of that already with bash scripts on my Lightsail linux to run one Xojo up, which was a great learning curve for me, so I am kinda glad you didnt release this sooner. (all except automating the conversation of the .pem file to .crt, didnt get to that yet) I reckon we will still pay you for this, as it makes updates easier, without telling my boss (the developer), so he will still think I am a God.
two quick questions -
considering that Lifeboat already completely handles Letsencrypt, should I uninstall that from my server first so there is no conflicts?
When updating the web app, I assume the running app is killed. So anyone using it would be booted off, right? Currently I schedule my upgrades to occur at midnight when my customers are asleep.
Lifeboat works best when you start with a fresh server (new image). You shouldn’t have any conflicts with Let’s Encrypt. Lifeboat uses the system package manager so LE will either be updated, skipped, or the certbot-nginx plugin will be added. If Lifeboat finds Apache installed, Lifeboat will uninstall it.
Yes, the app gets terminated for a few seconds. This does boot users off. You do have control over when the app is stopped and updated, check out the Stage vs. Deploy information in the User Guide. (tl;dr “Deploy” is the Stop 'n Swop step, uncheck “Automatically Deploy” and Lifeboat waits for you)
Scheduled updates are a great idea. I will dig into adding this feature, because I could certainly see myself using it!
Linux is willing to use the TimeZone code “EDT” but Xojo does not. AWS Lightsail servers may have seen the change occur this weekend. A fix has been released to correct for this!
Disappointed 42 was so short lived, I love that number. Build 43 is available now
