Cozy Light

Personal Server Made Easy.

Tests status:

Cozy Light allows you to deal, without effort, with many self-hosting use cases like turning your server into a file storage, hosting your static website or running HTML5 apps. You can try it on your desktop or directly set it up on your own server. It performs well on cheap hardwares like the Raspberry Pi or small Digital Ocean VPS.

Use cases and distributions

Because of its very flexible architecture Cozy Light can satisfy many usages related to self-hosting. Here are some examples:

• Personal cloud (calendars, files, contacts and tasks)
• Static blog deployer
• Video game console

For each use case a distribution is available. A distribution is a set of plugins and apps that works well together to satisfy a use case.

As an example, once Cozy Light is installed, run the following command to install the Personal Cloud distribution.

cozy-light install-distro personal-cloud

Display all available distributions:

cozy-light install-distro

Make your own configuration

As an illustration, here is how you handle the Static Website use case. The goal is to publish a website made of static files that is updated every time you commit on the Github repository:

# Platform configuration
cozy-light add-plugin cozy-labs/cozy-light-html5-apps
cozy-light add-plugin cozy-labs/cozy-light-domains
cozy-light add-plugin cozy-labs/cozy-light-githooks

# Static Website install
cozy-light install mygithubuser/mywebsite

# Website configuration
cozy-light link-domain mywebsite.com mygithubuser/mywebsite
cozy-light add-githook mygithubuser/mywebsite mysecret

# Run the platform and access to your website on the 80 port
cozy-light start --port 80

Benefits

• No need to learn a lot about system administration, everything can be done with very few command lines.
• You install only the modules you need.
• It's extensible, you can build your own app to satisfy your specific needs.
• Or simply write a plugin to give more features to the platform.
• No more headaches with relying on too many services, all your apps are located in the same place.
• No targeted ads because your apps store data where noone profiles you.

Screencasts

• Screencast d'introduction (French) (Vimeo Link)
• Introduction Screencast (Vimeo Link)

Install

Install Node.js (>= 0.10), Git and essential build tools then install cozy-light from the NPM package manager:

Install Node for Rapsberry Pi

# Not secured (unknown vendor) but easy 
wget http://node-arm.herokuapp.com/node_0.10.34.deb
sudo dpkg -i node_latest_armhf.deb

More secured way (offical vendor)

sudo su -
cd /opt
wget http://nodejs.org/dist/v0.10.26/node-v0.10.26-linux-arm-pi.tar.gz
tar xvzf node-v0.10.26-linux-arm-pi.tar.gz
ln -s node-v0.10.26-linux-arm-pi node
chmod a+rw /opt/node/lib/node_modules
chmod a+rw /opt/node/bin
echo 'PATH=$PATH:/opt/node/bin' > /etc/profile.d/node.sh

On Rapsberry Pi, it is recommended to clean npm cache before launching cozy-light installation.

npm cache clean

Ubuntu

sudo apt-get install build-essential
sudo apt-get install git npm nodejs-legacy
sudo npm install cozy-light -g

Fedora

su -
yum install make automake gcc gcc-c++ kernel-devel git nodejs
# yum install glibc-devel.i686 # for 64bits arch
yum remove node-gyp # see https://github.com/TooTallNate/node-gyp/issues/363
exit
# npm install mocha -g # if you intend to hack the platform
npm install node-gyp -g # required by pouchdb / leveldown
npm install cozy-light -g

Run

cozy-light start

Then, with your browser, connect to: http://localhost:19104/

Daemonize

To run Cozy Light in the background at each startup, it requires you to daemonize it with a system tool. To achieve that, the simplest way is to use a platform agnostic daemonizer tool. We recommend supervisor.

Install it that way:

sudo apt-get install supervisor

Then create a new configuration file /etc/supervisor/conf.d/cozy-light.conf with the following content (don't forget to put the right user in the user field):

[program:cozy-light]
autorestart=true
autostart=true
command=cozy-light start
redirect_stderr=true
user=youruser
environment=HOME="/home/youruser",USER="youruser"

Finally refresh Supervisor configuration and enjoy your Cozy Light:

supervisorctl update

Platform applications

By default the platform handles only apps based on Node.js and PouchDB. But through plugins you can install apps made only of static HTML or containers available on the Docker registry.

Install default applications

Application are fetched from github. Application name is built from the username and the repository name:

cozy-light install cozy-labs/calendar

For your information, most of the apps are runnable without Cozy Light. You can install and run them separately:

npm install cozy-calendar -g
cozy-calendar

Uninstall application

cozy-light uninstall cozy-labs/calendar

Available applications

• cozy-labs/tasky: simple and efficient task manager;
• cozy-labs/calendar: alarm and events manager;
• cozy-labs/files: file storage;
• cozy-labs/emails: webmail;
• cozy-labs/contacts: contact book;
• maboiteaspam/ma-clef-usb: another file storage.

HTML5 apps (require html5-apps plugin)

• frankrousseau/coffee-snake: snake game;
• frankrousseau/CrappyBird: Flappy bird clone.

Docker apps (require docker plugin)

• frankrousseau/couchdb: a couchdb database, can be useful for your PouchDB-based apps;
• frankrousseau/wordpress: Wordpress blog engine.
• frankrousseau/ghost: Ghost blog engine.

Plugins

Add plugin

You can extend capability of the platform by adding plugins:

cozy-light add-plugin cozy-labs/cozy-light-docker

Remove plugin

cozy-light remove-plugin cozy-labs/cozy-light-docker

Available plugins

• cozy-labs/cozy-light-simple-dashboard: minimalist dashboard for the platform.
• maboiteaspam/cozy-homepage: redirect root url to Cozy Dashboard app.
• maboiteaspam/cozy-opener: adds open command, it starts&opens Cozy-light for you.
• cozy-labs/cozy-light-auth: add auth capabilities to Cozy Light.
• cozy-labs/cozy-light-basic-auth: add basic auth capabilities to Cozy Light.
• cozy-labs/cozy-light-html5-apps: to manage HTML5 apps like classic apps.
• cozy-labs/cozy-light-docker: experimental plugin to manage docker containers like classic apps.
• cozy-labs/cozy-light-domains: link a domain name to a static app.
• cozy-labs/cozy-light-githooks: reinstall an app when a commit occurs on the Github repository.

Configuration

The configuration file is located at ~/.cozy-light/config.json path. App and plugin configuration is set through the command line. Other settings must be filled directly in the configuration file.

NB: The configuration file follows the JSON format.

Port

"port": 80,

HTTPS

Once the ssl field is present in the configuration file, Cozy Light will use SSL and require HTTPS protocol to be browsed.

"ssl": {
  "key": "/etc/cozy/server.key",
  "cert": "/etc/cozy/server.crt"
},

Contribution

Make us proposal on what you want to do in the issue page then send us your PR. You can write your own application or plugin.

Developer guide

Checkout and install the project

git checkout https://github.com/cozy-labs/cozy-light.git
cd cozy-light
git remote add upstream https://github.com/cozy-labs/cozy-light
npm install
npm install eslint -g
npm install mocha -g

Before you push your PR

npm test
npm run lint

Tips

To improve speed of repetitive testing we recommend to use rlidwka/sinopia, a private/caching npm repository server.

npm install -g sinopia
sinopia &
npm set registry http://localhost:4873/

To reset the default parameters

npm config set registry https://registry.npmjs.org/
killall sinopia

To install an application from a github repository from a specific branch, use the following command

cozy-light install github-user/github-repo@branch

FAQ

What's the main difference with Cozy?

Cozy is great and full featured. But its installation process and its memory consumption make it too hard to set up for novice and/or cheap hardware owner. So we decided to provide a ligther architecture. That way anyone could deploy Cozy applications on their hardware. Of course, you lost some features on the way like synchronization, auth management, powerful indexer, app isolation and better realtime management.

Why don't you propose CalDAV/CarDAV synchronization?

It could be done easily by reusing the Sync app from Cozy. It requires some extra work to be integrated. Once again, if many many people ask for it, we'll probably include it.

How do I manage multi-user?

Cozy Light is tied to the Unix user who runs it. So you could start easily a new instance of Cozy Light by making it run by another Unix user. It will run the full stack again, but you will have a strong isolation between the two users.

Why did you write Cozy Light in JavaScript instead of Coffeescript?

We are Coffescript fanboys but many people complain that our language choice prevent them to contribute. We think that collaborative work matters the most. So we decided to write Cozy Light in JavaScript.

How do I write my own application?

Start from an existing one to understand the architecture. Then we recommend you to use the Americano web framework and its plugin americano-cozy-pouchdb. You can refer to the actual Cozy.io documentation. Everything works the same except that you only need Node.js and Brunch as development environment.

I don't want or can't code, how can I help?

You have two options. You can either submit bug reports to us or application developers or simply spread the word. Tweeting about this new project or starring the Github repository are two great ways to support the project!

Community

You can reach the Cozy Community by:

• Chatting with us on IRC #cozycloud on irc.freenode.net
• Posting on our Forum
• Posting issues on this repo
• Mentioning us on Twitter