Hello! I'd like to propose something for this year's GSoC, something I've had the idea to make for several years now, and something I would really like to become a reality. My goal is to have an easy migration path for users of cPanel/WHM, which is a proprietary web hosting control panel for Linux servers, to using entirely free software on a free operating system. cPanel/WHM makes it easy to perform basic administration tasks on a Linux (CentOS) server. Core components are all free software: Apache Web Server, PHP, Dovecot, the Exim mail server and Roundcube webmail. But for its 70 million users, cPanel/WHM is not free: the monthly license fee has increased multiple times since 2019, enough to force many smaller website owners to shut down or look for alternatives. And since Red Hat also plan to cease investment in CentOS stable releases, some web hosting providers are in doubt about the future of that ecosystem. For all those people, I'd like to welcome them to Debian! We provide a free operating system, bundling the same software mentioned above, and the Debian LTS team supports each release for 5 years. Migration can be a very difficult process, though. Website code might make assumptions about filesystem paths, expect PHP to be configured in a certain way, and depend on MySQL databases being moved as well. Email users expect their forwarders and webmail settings not to change when they move to a new server. DNS configuration needs to be handled, too. Concretely: I should create a tool to import cPanel/WHM website backups and deploy them in a Debian environment. As much of the original functionality as possible must be preserved, including the easy web- based administration, which may be the most technically difficult part of the project. Already, Debian Edu, Freedombox and OpenWRT offer some potential solutions for that, which should be explored. What's maybe unusual about me is, although I'm a DD since almost 5 years, I'm studying for a Bachelor Computer Science degree since only 3 years. This means, I didn't have much free time recently to do anything useful for Debian. But now I can do something about that! Because a compulsory part of my course is to produce a practical project related to cloud IT. I propose to use Google Cloud Platform as a test-bed to develop a cPanel/WHM-compatible cloud image, based on Debian, and including the necessary tools to migrate out of an cPanel/WHM hosting environment. I think this is an important step, because cloud computing provides the most resource-efficient hosting platform available today, and many cPanel/WHM-based hosting environments aren't making full use of it yet. But in order to avoid creating vendor lock-in, I should equally support self-hosting (such as FreedomBox) or private clouds (which may be based on Docker). And I shouldn't make my solution Debian-specific, but where possible, it should work on at least Ubuntu as well. However I end up implementing this, one of the most important deliverables would be a good documentation. So that, when a website owner decides to migrate from cPanel/WHM, they can be informed of this option to migrate to entirely free software, be given clear instructions how to do that, and be connected with user groups and other established support channels around Debian. Please let me know how that sounds! Many thanks! Regards, -- Steven Chamberlain (@StevenC99 in IRC)
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