Your storage. Your rules.

Overview

Johnny wraps Garage with production-ready automation: TLS via Caddy, nightly SFTP backups with retention, a johnny CLI, and an optional Laravel web panel with two-factor authentication.

Orchestration runs only on your primary VPS (push model). Backup servers only need SSH/SFTP and disk space.

Requirements

• Ubuntu 24.04 LTS on the primary VPS
• DNS A/AAAA pointing your hostname at the server before install (Let's Encrypt)
• For each backup target: SSH/SFTP reachable from the primary, with write access under the remote path

Installation

Prefer the autoinstaller. It installs dependencies, starts Garage, creates the default bucket and keys, configures Caddy TLS, writes /etc/johnny/backup.json, installs nightly cron, and can optionally install the panel.

sudo mkdir -p /opt && sudo git clone https://github.com/andreapollastri/johnny /opt/johnny
cd /opt/johnny
sudo bash scripts/autoinstall.sh

Manual install

sudo bash scripts/install.sh
sudo systemctl start johnny-garage
sudo bash scripts/bootstrap-single-node.sh

Then configure TLS yourself — see config/caddy-johnny.caddy.example or config/nginx-johnny-s3.conf.example.

Web panel

Optional Laravel dashboard for buckets, objects, and Garage API keys. If you skipped it during autoinstall:

sudo bash scripts/install-panel.sh /opt/johnny https://panel.example.com

Create an admin

sudo -u www-data php /opt/johnny/panel/artisan johnny:admin you@example.com 'strong-password'

Open the panel hostname, sign in, then enable TOTP 2FA under Settings.

SMTP for password reset

Default MAIL_MAILER=log only writes to the Laravel log. Set SMTP in panel/.env, then rebuild the config cache:

sudo -u www-data php /opt/johnny/panel/artisan config:cache

CLI

Backups

Nightly job (03:00) uses rclone to sync every bucket to one or more SFTP targets under a dated folder layout. Retention deletes YYYY-MM-DD folders older than retention_days.

johnny-backups/
  2026-04-03/
    default/
    my-bucket/
  2026-04-04/
    default/
    my-bucket/

Config: /etc/johnny/backup.json (mode 600). Logs: /var/log/johnny-nightly.log.

S3-to-S3 replication

cp config/replication/media-to-eu.env.example config/replication/media-to-eu.env
# edit credentials, then:
sudo bash scripts/replicate-run.sh config/replication/media-to-eu.env

Panel API

Secured with Laravel Sanctum personal access tokens. Interactive docs at /api/docs, OpenAPI at /api/openapi.yaml.

sudo -u www-data php /opt/johnny/panel/artisan johnny:api-token you@example.com --name=provisioning

Provision bucket + key

curl -sS -X POST \
  "https://panel.example.com/api/buckets/provision" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_TOKEN" \
  -H "Accept: application/json" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"bucket":"customer-orders"}'

Laravel disk

Compatible with Laravel's S3 filesystem driver. Install the Flysystem adapter, paste credentials into .env, and store files.

composer require league/flysystem-aws-s3-v3 "^3.0" --with-all-dependencies

FILESYSTEM_DISK=s3
AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=GK....123
AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=012...XYZ
AWS_DEFAULT_REGION=johnny
AWS_BUCKET=my-bucket
AWS_ENDPOINT=https://s3.my-domain.com
AWS_USE_PATH_STYLE_ENDPOINT=true

Storage::disk('s3')->put('avatars/photo.jpg', $contents);

The provisioning API returns the same keys in an env map for automated tenant onboarding.

Updates

Repo path is saved in /etc/johnny/repo.path. Nightly cron runs johnny update --pull at 02:30.

sudo johnny update --pull

Pulls the latest release, syncs scripts, runs Composer + migrations + cache rebuild when the panel is present, and applies numbered scripts from scripts/migrations/. Log: /var/log/johnny-update.log.

Security

• Restrict /etc/johnny (especially backup.json and credentials/) — defaults are already 600/700
• Prefer SSH keys on backup servers; password auth is documented for simplicity
• Firewall: expose 443 (and 80 for ACME); restrict 22 to trusted IPs
• rclone sync can delete extras under each dated prefix — review the rclone sync docs

Configuration

Source and issues: github.com/andreapollastri/johnny · MIT License · v1.0.5