Users, resources, actions, and operations: everything you need to know to get started with Moss

Moss users

When you sign up at Moss, you’re either creating a new organization or joining an existing one. In the first case you’re the admin of the organization, in the latter you’re a developer.

Developers can create, deploy and monitor sites, and manage all related resources, e.g. databases or non-privileged server users.

Admins have full access to their Moss account. Hence, they can also add, manage and monitor servers, privileged server users, and any other resource in Moss.

Server users

A privileged server user is one that can become root via sudo. Moss creates one such user automatically on your servers: moss. The admin can log into the servers as moss to run administration commands that require root privileges.

Sites cannot be run by a privileged server user, because that poses an unnecessary security risk. Instead, usually you want to have a different (non-privileged) server user running each site on the server. E.g. user app in the following screenshot.

Resources

Moss helps you manage different resources: servers, sites, server users, databases, database users, cron jobs, workers, firewall rules, and the like. These resources are organized in workspaces so that you can easily differentiate among environments, clients and/or teams.

Every resource has a status:

• Ok: Moss successfully set up the resource
• Error: Moss couldn’t set up the resource
• Pending: There’s some pending operation to perform on the resource
• Setting up: Moss is setting up the resource at this moment
• Deleting: Moss is deleting the resource at this moment

Servers have additional statuses. In any case, Moss doesn’t shows anything special when a resource is ok. However you’ll see some kind of indication when there’s an ongoing operation on the resource or it’s in “error” status:

To easily identify servers in “error” status, you’ll see a warning sign next to them too:

Actions

You can run actions on your resources to achieve a given objective.

High-level resources like servers and sites have a dropdown menu with their available actions:

Other resources like databases and cron jobs have an array of available actions embedded in the table where they’re listed:

The Set up action is common across all resources. If a resource is in “error” status because of a temporary failure, you can set it up again to try to fix it. You can also set up a resource which is “ok” – usually this is not necessary, but it’s not a problem because we design our operations to be idempotent.

In effect, actions may trigger operations on your servers.

Operations

If Moss needs to connect to a server to run some commands, then it’s an operation. You may check the operations that have taken place in the workspaces you belong to and access their full logs.