Hello all.
New paying Anvil user. I love it so far…it’s exactly what I’ve been seeking for a few of my side entrepreneurial projects.
I have a few projects I intend to use Anvil for. If any of them are successful, I believe I’ll hit the limits of the Individual paid plan pretty quickly and would like to self-host if possible to work around those limits. However, as I understand the terms of the Affero GPL license, using the app server means I’ll have to provide a way for anyone who uses my application to download the entire source of my app…obviously, not a good thing.
Is this an accurate interpretation? If so, what exactly is the purpose of having the open source app server to begin with? I could see possibly it being insurance in case Anvil as a company goes away, but I’m not sure how it can be used commercially at all.
Thanks in advance for your thoughts!
I’m also curious about this at my day job. I’m the CIO of company where I’m convinced we could really use something like Anvil, but for many use cases we’d want to run the resulting code locally, on our own servers. At first glance it seems I have two options:
- If I need the FULL Anvil experience, I can get a quote from Anvil for “Enterprise”, which also included the code editor. However, we don’t necessarily need local editing, just local execution, so on to:
- Run the application on the open sourced Anvil app server. This sounds ideal, but the app server is licensed as AGPL, which means that by using it to run my code, I have to make both’s source code available to my users…obviously not acceptable.
Is there a third option, where, if you’re a paying customer, you can get access to the app server that’s licensed in a way that doesn’t include the AGPL copyleft language so that you can get local execution without the full enterprise license?
If not, what exactly is the intent of making the app server available? Perhaps to assure folks that if Anvil the company goes away, all hope is not lost?
Thanks in advance for your answers.
Hi @john.wells,
Good news: You do not have to make your Anvil apps open source to use the App Server. It is perfectly fine to host closed-source apps with the Anvil App Server.
Although the App Server’s licence is based on the AGPL, the first paragraph is a specific carve-out stating that you do not have to distribute your apps’ source code. (We’re also explicit about this in the README).
What your users must be able to do is download the source of the App Server itself. Fortunately, this happens automatically - if you pip install anvil-app-server, the App Server will print a discreet link to the GitHub repository in your browser’s Javascript console. (If you build the App Server yourself from source, the provided build script will include its own source code in the generated binary, and provide its own download link to the JS console. If you’re doing something funkier, you’ll have to make sure you provide source some other way, but “out of the box” it all works.)
If for some reason you need them, custom commercial (non-AGPL) licences for the App Server are available – just drop an email to sales@anvil.works. But you don’t need any custom licence to host closed-source apps with the App Server. It’s officially allowed 
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Thanks @meredydd. You have no idea how happy this makes me. I’m honestly surprised that Anvil isn’t eating the world at the moment. Based on a few other posts I’ve seen, I suspect the AGPL is turning folks off. Perhaps you should make this carve-out very clear on the website?
Regardless, thank you so much. Very excited at the possibilities Anvil offers!
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