Nextcloud
We don’t need google where we’re going…
I had some downtime recently, and with school coming up, I decided to install and configure a NextCloud instance for the family to use. There are a lot of great things about nextcloud not the least of which is the ability to backup images from your phone. Now, I used to run an OwnCloud instance back in the day on a dark and mysterious “tower-under-the-desk” kind of server but that was quite a while ago and it never caught on like I hoped it would.
Increasingly lately, the family has been asking me for new and inventive ways to do things on the internet. From moving pictures quickly between devices, to keeping backups from their new fancy-schmancy chromebooks I think now is the perfect time to brush off the old home administrator hat.
The Reason:
I’ve spent several years trying to figure out the best way to solve a few very simple problems. though when they were originally posed, I had different contstraints.
Among the contraints I had were: how do I keep files:
- backed up
- centeral
- in sync across devices
- safe from prying eyes
Originally there were three contexts for these problems: pictures, movies, and documents.
pictures needed to be easily shared, movies accessible with DLNA and documents safe and offline.
the original answer was a hodgepodge of services: Samba with miniDLNA, Subversion, et al.
I had a microcosm of services that worked very well for quite some time, however this solution is fairly technical and relies on the use of specific tools in order to be fully effective. I’d categorize that whole set up as being pretty far outside of the realm of the average person.
The Approach
After I spent about an hour looking up good ways to deploy everything I want to deploy on this particular server and I settled on a composed docker application stack to serve all of the nextcloud components necessary.
It didn’t take long to set up and required very little actual configuration.
Deployment and Prerequisites
The first thing I do is submit all of the required DNS records:
- office.domain.com
- nextcloud.domain.com
That way by the time everything else is up and ready DNS has propagated and I can SSH right in with the friendly DNS name instead of the AWS butchery, because that’s how I roll.
Then I deployed an Ubuntu 20.04 AWS instance (t2.medium in this case) and did the following:
a) installed some pre-requisite packages:
- apt-transport-https
- ca-certificates
- curl
- gnupg-agent
- software-properties-common
b) Added the docker repository and install docker-ce and docker-compose
Install and Configure apache2
Create /etc/apache2/sites-available/010.nextcloud.conf
Create /etc/apache2/sites-available/011.office.conf
Create /etc/apache2/sites-available/999-catchall.conf
Enable the appropriate sites
LetsEncrypt!
This part is a lot more fun than it used to be. on a 20.04 host you simply need to install certbot and run it!
and fill out the information.
et Voila!
all of the groundwork has been laid! now we can get into the fun bits…
Doing the Docker Deed
Well, that was fun… I need a gin drink…
Much better.
Now that we’re here, we can start setting up docker, which fortunately, is nowhere near as hard as it sounds.
Setting up the environment
I like putting docker apps in /opt I feel like it’s the most appropriate place for them, but that’s like, just my opinion, man…
Anyway, docker looks for a file named .env from which it reads all of its envvars for a
docker-composed app. So, we’re going to put some goodies in there so that we can let docker do all
of the setup while I drink my gin drink.
Here’s (basically) what I used:
The docker-compose.yml file
This part is a little bit more involved so feel free to copy and paste:
This sets up 5 different docker containers, each running one service with its configuration and runing directives nested within each configuration object.
these containers run on a localized docker container network named nextcloud.
we can eventually run multiple docker networks on a given host. I’ll prpobably stub my toe on that later when I set up jitsi using the exact same method.
From here we should be about ready to start up the docker stack.
Also Please Note:
the command directive on the mariadb service container is absolutely essential, if
you forget it you’ll whang your noggin on this:
General Error: 4047 InnoDB refuses to write tables with ROW_FORMAT=COMPRESSED or KEY_BLOCK_SIZE
A Note about using docker-compose
When running docker-composed apps it’s important to have a solid grasp of the basics
pull
docker-compose pull
dump old images
docker image prune --force
check running containers
docker ps
start composed app
from the directory in which docker-compose.yml _AND_ .env can be found
docker-compose up -d
stop composed add
from the directory in which docker-compose.yml _AND_ .env can be found
docker-compose down
Some Thoughts as we wrap up
Congratulations on getting this far! This was my third try at setting up NextCloud. The first time I tried installing it using the snap only to realize that in order to set up collabora I’d have to deploy a docker instance anyway because that’s just how collabora works.
My second try was using the php zipfile in /var/www and using apache to broker everything. In the end though this was the best way to set things up and secure them (running in AWS as I am) I don’t have to add all of the ports to my security profile which greatly streamlines the setup of this instance.
Back to work
Moving right along: navigate to https://nextcloud.domain.com/nextcloud in a browser and you should be presented with a prompt to “create an admin user”
once you’ve entered a username and password you’ll be prompted to configure the database connection.
for this you should select mariadb and enter the password mysql_password configured in the .env file.
once you’ve done that you should simply be able to log in with the user you just created.
F!@#$@& COLLABORA
All this talk about collabora and it still doesn’t work?! Don’t fret, the UI is cool af and if you’re anything like me, the shiny caught your attention and you tried to go play with all the pretty features. Take heed traveler: before you go editing .odt files in the browser you have to enable the collabora plugin, otherwise you’re going to stub your toe on the office suite.
Under the you icon in the top right corner you should see apps
screenshot here
Under office tools in the menu on the left, you should find the collabora plugin tile. Select it to enable it. Once everything is downloaded and enabled, go to your settings and under the administration section enter your your https://office.domain.name collabora instance set up in the composed appstack.
Desktop Client Sit and Spin
In order to get a desktop sync client working as intended it may become necessary to directly modify the php config directly (very un-docker). because I don’t know how to get this bit into a docker-compose.yml file yet you’ll have to manually connect to your docker instance and add the following to /var/www/html/config/config.php
things should “Just Work”, and now you’re done, go you!