Finally managed to install a custom app via Cloudron by following the tutorial documentation, and without installing Docker.

1. Install the Cloudron CLI locally

sudo npm install -g cloudron
cloudron login my.example.com

2. Setup build tools

One-click install the Docker Registry App (replace alfa.bravo below with this app domain) and Build Service App (replace charlie.delta below with this app domain) via your Cloudron App Store. Configure the latter's credentials in /app/data/docker.json via the File Manager

{
  "alfa.bravo": {
    "username": "CLOUDRON_USERNAME",
    "password": "CLOUDRON_PASSWORD"
  }
}

and restart the app.

3. Install the pre-packaged custom app

Replace the simple tutorial app with yours:

git clone https://git.cloudron.io/cloudron/tutorial-nodejs-app
cd tutorial-nodejs-app
cloudron build --build-service-url https://charlie.delta --repository alfa.bravo/echo/foxtrot --tag golf
cloudron install --image alfa.bravo/echo/foxtrot:golf

If you want to update, run cloudron build again, then call cloudron update like so:

cloudron build --build-service-url https://charlie.delta --repository alfa.bravo/echo/foxtrot --tag golf
cloudron update --image alfa.bravo/echo/foxtrot:golf

Resources

Aside from the tutorial documentation, I found some hints in these forum topics:

• How to build (custom) apps using the docker-registry
• How do I do this??
• UI not working

Whisper or 'Whisper-Faster' can run as a standalone terminal program on macOS 10.14 with whisper-standalone-win by simply downloading the binary from 'releases' and running a single command from the resulting folder:

./whisper-faster "~/alfa/bravo.mp3" --pp --model base.en --language=en --output_format all --output_dir .

This will fetch the model if there isn't a local copy, and transcribe into about half a dozen formats, including plaintext, JSON, and subtitle files.

The openai/whisper documentation says:

The .en models for English-only applications tend to perform better, especially for the tiny.en and base.en models. We observed that the difference becomes less significant for the small.en and medium.en models.

To run it without printing text into the console, use -pp or send to NUL

macOS Time Machine exclusions can be managed via the terminal, as documented in Exclude folders by regex (?) from time machine backup, Control Time Machine from the command line, and Scripting Timemachine exclusion lists:

find `pwd` -maxdepth 3 -type d -name 'node_modules' | xargs -n 1 tmutil addexclusion

But this doesn't make it show up in the System Preferences GUI. Writing to defaults seems to do that:

sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.TimeMachine.plist SkipPaths -array-add "~/.cache"

but I'm too paranoid about doing it wrong to see what happens.

Asimov is another option (installed via homebrew) to "Automatically exclude development dependencies from Apple Time Machine backups".

Forked cors-anywhere to replace cors-proxy.fringe.zone with cors.rosano.ca in Joybox, OSFeedbox, and home.

YunoHost has an 'Edit' button on their homepage which lets you directly modify the content and send them a 'patch'.

I wasn't able to submit my change because of a 'File not found' error, but still find it fascinating to not require people to use GitHub or Git in order to contribute.

The logic is in the seemingly random 'gertrude' repository (which has not much of a README or description for what it is, and it looks like the 'patch' is just the full HTML page content; perhaps someone can manually integrate it later. They claim to require email verification to catch spam before actually sending the change.

If it was possible to put a mailto on the internet without spam, it could remove friction from this kind of collaboration and create steps for people to do larger things.