A few weeks ago, I started looking into integrating our store / SSO login with OwnID, to solve the fact that when your SSO session times out, you have to re-sign into the store (also, in 2023, protecting all your services behind a simple password seems a little.. too little)
The development got stuck behind decomissioning longhorn (another long story, it didn't scale well!), but after finally reproducing the prod store in dev for an accurate bug report to the OwnID team.. it worked perfectly
So... we now have passwordless / biometric logins for the store / SSO!
Just after I bragged yesterday about the increase in pod count, a bug in the webhook handler caused all subsequent orders to get stuck for ~10 hours! If you'd made a change to your subscription during that time, or signed up, you'd have been wondering where your apps went and why nothing provisioned
Here's what this looked like...
I squished the bug and hardened the webhook receiver, then tried to process all the backlogged orders. If you received a few duplicate confirmations this morning, that'll be why. If you placed an order and didn't receive it, try cancelling and then resuming the order to force the update.
What I didn't expect is how many users would sign up for service and not jump into Discord, or get in touch when things didn't work. Discord makes announcmements / updates so easy, that I realized I hadn't invested enough effort into other communications channels, like email (an emailed welcome on purchase is still on the to-do-asap list)
Since we're still at beta-level stability, and I don't want a reputation for being unreliable, I wanted a way to alert users to changes to their apps' health - I discovered that we can do this with our existing health dashboard (using Gatus), by enabling email alerting. After a brief poll of the #elf-friends channel, I've now turned this on, so if you've got any unhealthy apps (and there are a few still), you'll get one email after 20m of downtime, and one email upon recovery.
The fake qBittorrent API is the killer feature - it means you can hook your Premiumize (etc) subscription to the Arrs, and auto-source and download directly as if you were using qBittorrent locally.
See more on the app page, or perform a 24h trial / subscription at the store!
Shortly after receiving our first actual payment for services, Stripe got in touch and asked me to clarify how the business works, to ensure we're supportable under their Restricted Businesses list
I responded as below, and thought that this would be useful to blog, since it succintly summarizes my thoughts about how ElfHosted operates.
