#5 is very interesting to me. I use (and paid for!) Unraid. It’s generally quite good. Their Community Apps plug-in scratches the same itch as the Umbrel App Store. I run several community-maintained of services with it, but it is… unclear… how to spin up your own image.

From what I can tell (and I might be dumb) you can’t really run a Docker image on Unraid unless you:

1) write an XML file using an undocumented schema

2) build and upload your image to Docker hub

3) get your container listed in community apps

Now I’m SURE it’s not actually that dumb. But I couldn’t figure it out before I got distracted, and thus I haven’t done it. All the “documentation” is exclusively forum threads. What little formal documentation exists is obsolete. It really feels like it’s set up for a core community of developers rather than the users.

Coming from that experience, I was impressed with a couple things about Umbrel as I read through OP:

(1) they have clear documentation on how to publish something to their App Store

(2) they have a documented YAML that handles most of the configuration

(3) they take an active role in curating the App Store. They claim to help you put together a nice listing.

(4) they have some actual tools to test your package

(5) the App Store has a concept of cross-app dependencies. They give the example of a blockchain explorer that needs a bitcoin node running. Very cool! I want to use this functionality to have one RDBMS, one git host, one logging service, etc all shared by the various apps I deploy.