Nextcloud

Tip

I started by creating a server with 1GB of RAM. We were getting out of memory errors, so I upgraded to 2GB and all seems fine for now.

I used these instructions: How to Install Nextcloud with Nginx and Lets Encrypt on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS

I also used these for a more upto date installation guide, not much changes: Example installation on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS

To create these Salt states for install: https://gitlab.com/kb/salt/-/merge_requests/29

To download:

wget -q https://download.nextcloud.com/server/releases/latest.zip
cd ~/repo/project/nextcloud.{ domain }/
unzip -qq latest.zip
# create the 'live' folder
mv nextcloud live
# tidy up
rm latest.zip

Use fabric to create the database:

fab create-db nextcloud.{ domain }

Installation

Setup

Here we want to make sure we have installed our dependancies:

sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade
sudo apt install php-gd php-curl php-mbstring php-intl php-gmp php-bcmath php-xml php-imagick php-zip

You will also need to pick your database type (mysql, sqlite, postgres) Then also install your web engine (apache2, nginx)

Database Setup

Here you need to create the database that you will be using.

MySQL is suggested here, so the example will follow that:

sudo mysql
CREATE USER 'username'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'password';
CREATE DATABASE IF NOT EXISTS nextcloud CHARACTER SET utf8mb4 COLLATE utf8mb4_general_ci;
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON nextcloud.* TO 'username'@'localhost';
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
quit;

Permissions Setup

We need the majority of our root directory owned by:

sudo chown -R www-data:www-data */*/nextcloud

If you encounter errors then you may want to change the permissions back to the original user

Installing via occ

It seems the easiest way with the least issues is to use php for the install They have documentation on this to help us along, the example is:

$ cd /var/www/nextcloud/
$ sudo -u www-data php occ  maintenance:install \
--database='mysql' --database-name='nextcloud' \
--database-user='root' --database-pass='password' \
--admin-user='admin' --admin-pass='password'

Replace any variable you need to, and for help just use:

sudo -u www-data php occ help

Supported databases are:

- sqlite (SQLite3 - Nextcloud Community edition only)
- mysql (MySQL/MariaDB)
- pgsql (PostgreSQL)
- oci (Oracle - Nextcloud Enterprise edition only)

If all goes well the configuation file should be filled out with some details and you should be able to visit the web page and start using nextcloud

Import

Contacts

Export from Google in vcf format, vCard (for iOS Contacts).

Google Drive

From Adding files to Nextcloud using the command line:

# log in as yourself (e.g. ``pat``)
mkdir /home/web/repo/project/nextcloud.{ domain }/live/data/pat/files/yb

Tip

yb is the folder where you want to put the files (e.g. short version of your company name).

https://rclone.org/

Tip

I haven’t done this yet, but it would be far better to download onto the Nextcloud server (to save upload bandwidth).

Download and install rclone:

curl https://rclone.org/install.sh | sudo bash

Configure:

rclone config

Tip

Use a simple name for your drive e.g. pk-drive.

Tip

Choose Read-only access to file metadata and file contents.

Sync:

rclone sync -P pk-drive:/ /home/web/repo/project/nextcloud.{ domain }/live/data/pat/files/yb/

# to download in LibreOffice format
rclone sync -P --drive-export-formats ods,odt,odp pk-drive:/ .

Warning

Think carefully about the download format. Nextcloud says, You can even collaborate with others on ODT and Markdown files! It looks as if Collabora Online and ONLYOFFICE are only free for personal use, https://nextcloud.com/onlyoffice/ https://nextcloud.com/collaboraonline/ Perhaps we collaborate using Markdown only!

Scan (scan for new files and update the file cache):

sudo -u www-data php /home/web/repo/project/nextcloud.{ domain }/live/occ files:scan --path="pat/files/kb/"

Tip

pat is the Nextcloud user name.