Running a Hosted Service

Turn on cloud mode to run Emberly for other people, with billing, custom domains, squads and Discovery.

Cloud mode turns on everything embrly.ca uses to run Emberly as a service: paid plans, custom domains for users, squads, Discovery, perks and managed storage.

It needs a license with the hosted service feature, from licenses.embrly.ca. The Elastic License 2.0 doesn't allow offering Emberly to others as a service without one. See License & Branding.

Turn It On

Add your license key in Admin → Settings → License & branding, or set EMBERLY_LICENSE_KEY.
Set the environment variable and restart:

EMBERLY_RUN_CLOUD="true"

Without a license that includes hosted service, EMBERLY_RUN_CLOUD is ignored.

Billing with Stripe

In Admin → Settings → Integrations → Stripe, paste your Stripe secret key and click Connect Stripe.
Emberly creates the webhook it needs in your Stripe account, and adds its plans and add-ons to Stripe as products.

That's all the Stripe setup needed. Use a test-mode key (sk_test_...) first to try checkout without real payments.

You can also set STRIPE_SECRET_KEY and STRIPE_WEBHOOK_SECRET instead. In that case, create a webhook in Stripe pointing at https://your-domain/api/payments/webhook, with these events:

checkout.session.completed
invoice.payment_succeeded
invoice.payment_failed
customer.subscription.updated
customer.subscription.deleted
charge.failed
charge.refunded

Plans and Prices

Edit plans, prices and add-ons in Admin → Products, then sync them to Stripe. Discount codes are managed on the same page.

Turn off Accept Payments in Admin → Settings → General → Billing to keep everything free. Checkout and the plans pricing page are hidden, and users ask for more storage or domains through Profile → Applications instead. Existing subscribers can still manage or cancel their billing.

Custom Domains

Users' custom domains are set up through Cloudflare for SaaS, which handles their HTTPS certificates.

On a Cloudflare zone you own, turn on Custom Hostnames and set a fallback origin pointing at your server.
Create an API token with SSL and Certificates → Edit and DNS → Edit for that zone.
Add the token and zone ID in Admin → Settings → Integrations → Cloudflare, or set them as environment variables:

CLOUDFLARE_API_TOKEN="..."
CLOUDFLARE_ZONE_ID="..."
CNAME_TARGET="cname.your-domain.com"

CNAME_TARGET is the hostname users point their domains at.

Perks

Contributor and booster perks give extra storage and domains:

Perk	Needs
GitHub contributors	A GitHub token and your organisation, in Integrations → GitHub, or `GITHUB_PAT` and `GITHUB_ORG`
Discord boosters	A bot in your server, in Integrations → Discord, or `DISCORD_BOT_TOKEN`, `DISCORD_SERVER_ID` and `DISCORD_SUPPORTER_ROLE`

Managed Storage

Cloud mode can give users and squads their own storage buckets, created automatically on Vultr, Linode or OVHcloud object storage. Add a provider's API keys in Admin → Settings → Storage. Buckets can then be assigned to users and squads from the same page.

Status Page

Set STATUS_PAGE_URL to your status page's address to show a status badge in the site footer. The full list of cloud-mode variables is in .env.cloud.example in the repository.