Castopod

This is a repackaged open source software product wherein additional charges apply for cloudimg support services.

Overview

Castopod is the free open source platform for hosting and publishing podcasts. It serves standards-compliant RSS feeds with Podcasting 2.0 tags (chapters, transcripts, funding, location), hosts multiple podcasts on one instance, and has ActivityPub built in, so every podcast is its own Fediverse account that listeners on Mastodon and other platforms can follow, comment on and share. Privacy-friendly analytics report episode downloads by country and player with no third party trackers, and embeddable players let episodes be placed on any website. This image delivers Castopod fully installed and configured, so a complete podcast platform is running within minutes of launch. The current release available is Castopod 1.15.

Application Stack

Castopod is a CodeIgniter 4 application running on PHP 8.3 with OPcache, served by nginx with php-fpm. MariaDB provides the database. The install wizard is already completed, so customers land directly on the admin sign-in page. Castopod's scheduled background tasks (Fediverse broadcasting, WebSub, RSS imports) run every minute via a systemd timer.

Secure By Default

On the first boot of your instance a one-shot service creates a fresh database schema, a fresh MariaDB password, a fresh analytics salt and a fresh administrator password, all unique to that instance, and writes the administrator email and password to a root only file. The instance's own address is set as the application base URL automatically. No shared or default credentials and no content ship in the image.

Ready To Use

The Castopod code tree, web server and database are all configured, with application files and uploaded media on one dedicated, independently resizable storage volume and the database on another. Browse to the instance address, sign in as the administrator, and create your first podcast.

cloudimg Support

24/7 technical support by email and chat. Help with Castopod deployment, upgrades, HTTPS and domain configuration, email and S3 media storage setup, Fediverse federation, RSS migration from other hosts, performance tuning and database administration.

Use Cases

Independent podcasters and podcast networks self-hosting their shows, broadcasters and publishers keeping full ownership of feeds and audience data, organisations distributing internal audio content, and anyone leaving hosted podcast platforms while keeping their RSS subscribers via feed redirects.

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