I’m working on a new App for the hub and my working title is ‘balenaCaddyReverser’… but that is a terrible name!
Any help on the name or constructive advice on the project in general is very welcome!
Project summary: balenaCaddyReverser is a Caddy based reverse-proxy implementation served from your Raspberry Pi! It implements ACME DNS Challenge to obtain tls certificates from Let’s Encrypt and is configured via balena device variables in the cloud dashboard. Repo URL
this is a very good question! At some point we tried to stop adding balena to the names, however in some cases, adding balena on the name of the app makes sense.
I’m going to open an internal discussion about this, but feel free to add your common-sense here
Hey @SamEureka good to see you’re still around these parts!
Other members of the balena team will almost certainly have heard me saying ‘don’t call your project balenaXYZ’ for a while now For example when someone containerises an application, they don’t call it Docker-Nginx (or whatever, or maybe they do?!), it’s still just Nginx, so why would it be balenaNginx?
As such, I’d recommend just dropping the balena part when you list it on hub as it’s kinda redundant, and making sure you have a good description set that will allow people to find and see what the app is. Something else a lot of folks miss out on is dressing up their app page as well; check out the apps by VolkovLabs to see the possibilities.
Thanks for the feedback! I think my naming thought process originally was “how will they know it’s ‘balenafied’ if I don’t put it in the name”. But that was before we had the Hub. I agree that with a good description in the balena.yml, gituhub repo, and some topic tags… people can figure out what is going on. At work we use a ‘common access card’ to log into systems… people always call it a CAC card. This is the same sort of thing I suppose. I’m going to revisit my other Apps in the hub and see if the names can’t be streamlined a little.
I just took a look at balena-nfs/balena.yml at main · VolkovLabs/balena-nfs · GitHub I had no idea you could put that level of markdown formatting in the balena.yml file! I feel like I have some catching up to do there. Are there plans to ‘enhance’ the documentation around the balena.yml? I don’t feel like the full potential is easily intuited by reading the docs I’ve found.
Thanks again for the very constructive and educational feedback!
//Sam
Currently, the issue is that we’re not really happy with our implementation. It’s one of those things where creative people are making the best of what they have, but ideally we’d implement this properly and not tell you that you need to cram all of your hub page content into the balena.yml format.
It’s already in progress to migrate the logo and description out of this file and surface the fields in the dashboard. I’m of the opinion that resource metadata should not be held in the balena.yml file since you should be able to change it without creating another release. Readme files and documentation probably should still be with the release, but shouldn’t be crammed into a single file.
This is me justifying our lack of documentation embracing this feature, but also hopefully offering some reassurance that it will improve in the future.
Glad to hear that there are plans to improve both the implementation and the documentation. Putting the instructions, description, and other documentation in a markdown file(s) would be easier to manage than the yaml file. I always feel like yaml is fragile when you have several different concerns represented in the same file.
I don’t know if there is anything I can do to help, but I’m happy to do so if you guys can think of something!
As for the original post topic… I’ve renamed the project to caddy-reverso. Still a terrible name… but not redundant and terrible. It also works now! I just need to document properly and figure out how to get it on the Balena hub. I’m going to see if I can figure it out on my own but I’ll post in the forum if I get stuck.
For example when someone containerises an application, they don’t call it Docker-Nginx (or whatever, or maybe they do?!), it’s still just Nginx, so why would it be balenaNginx?