Guide for 3rd Party Support Teams

This page offers guidance to members of your teams, or support staff of the Apps installed via Launchpal. Please send them to this page if they have questions about your hosting or servers.

What is Launchpal?

Launchpal makes it easy for users to deploy self hosted apps on cloud servers. Currently we support servers at 4 hosts: AWS, Digital Ocean, Vultr, and Linode.

How does Launchpal Work?

Launchpal connects to hosts API to create servers that run Docker. It then creates a container within Docker to run the users chosen application.

Please take time to understand the key concepts , eg. Projects, Servers, Apps & Domains.

It may also be useful to read through this guide to see how Launchpal works: Create your first project.

How do I get access to the server?

Your application is running within a Docker container (the app container to be specific).

The normal server SSH provided by the the host will not give you access to any logs / files. Please do not use those unless you understand Docker & Launchpal server builds.

You should SSH into the container using the SSH login provided by Launchpal, not the Server host.

IMPORTANT: The user you are supporting needs to provide you with the Launchpal SSH login instructions from the Project Access tab.

Where are the files?

The application files are stored within the Container, in /var/www/app, and the files uploaded by the user are in /var/www/user. Both of these are served as the document root.

Launchpal uses Nginx as its web server. When a web request comes in it first checks the for the file in the users files (/var/www/user), and if it does not exist there, it will read the file from the application folder /var/www/app.

Always edit files inside the container using the Launchpal provided SSH details as explained above. Do not use the main server SSH login unless you know what you are doing and are familiar with Docker.

IMPORTANT: Do not modify docker filesystem driver layer files directly on the host. Only edit the files via the specific Launchpal provided SSH login.

Do you keep backups?

Yes - Launchpal keeps 1 backup a day for 7 days. This is a backup of the container and can be used by the user to launch a new project or roll back if anything went wrong. More details about backups here.

What level of support do you provide?

Launchpal supports the projects created on the servers and tries to help users with basic application & server issues where we can.

We do not provide support related to feature requests, bugs or issues in the 3rd party Applications like Wordpress. We also do not provide technical support related to the physical servers provided by the host.

How can our support teams contact you about questions / issues?

Please contact us if you think we can help. Details on how to contact us are here.