Status NextCloud as App?

Yes, about same here. There is a large overlap (eg. calendar, addressbook) with Freedombox features, that’s why exchanging not needed php interpreter features with more native performance would look ok to me.

I mostly see just the need for a webfrontend for filehosting and sharing/editing/publishing. Ideally including photo and video browsing and playing (transcoding if needed).

Good coupling and syncing with the local filesystems seems important to me, due to the different means of accessing it on a freedombox.

From the feature list both nextcloud and pydio cells may work some day, so there remains to compare the required efforts and practical usage test.

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(i.e. how pydio performs compared to nextcloud on low powered single board computers)

I think it is all about choices. However, don’t forget this topic is in the development section. There is no guarantee that Nextcloud works on the Freedombox. For now the question is if anybody has experience about Nextcloud and FreedomBox?

My understanding is that it has to be able to run on the FreedomBox Pioneer (low powered single board computer).

Pydio cells could be another option.

With this thread, I want to check if somebody from the Freedombox developers or community is actively working on supporting Nextcloud on FreedomBox. It does not seem like it.

We are trying to make sure that Contributor Invites are very well defined tasks on what we expect as outcome, how to implement and how much work is involved. It might frustrate first time contributors otherwise. Exploratory tasks can be considered more advanced by nature.

I have some years of experience with self-hosting Nextcloud on SBCs starting with RPi1 to now odroidC2.

It of course depends on what you want from it. I mostly used the cloud sync between my devices which worked well on all devices. The WebUI works well on odroidC2 but of course speed depends on your bandwidth especially if you have asynchronous DSL like in Germany.

So my experiences concern only 1-5 account instances on SBCs at home. Performance equals in the meantime the performance of the nextcloud I installed at a host with a professional data center with similar settings.

That seams like a reasonable use case.

I do not expect anybody to have more than 5 user accounts.

Could you provide more details about your configuration (OS, web server, modules etc.)? Maybe, some installation instructions or even configuration files (with no personal secrets)?

I will. Unfortunately my ISP has cut my line right today because of a change of my contract :roll_eyes:
Hope I’ll have it only tomorrow. As soon as it’s back I will report.
Spoiler:
Armbian, apache2, iirc I installed nextcloud from the ppa, updates regularly with the web updater.

To be continued

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@homer77 thank you. So, there is a ppa and you use it. That is good news. Maybe, the Freedombox team can get Nextcloud into Debian fast track repository @jvalleroy @sunil?

Actually I’m not right sure about that. I started with the ppa once. But after checking it on my server thinking about it I believe the last time I set it up it I was just unpacking the .zip into html folder of my apache.

Following the official installation guides on docs.nextcloud.com the deployment is pretty straight forward. Including example scripts for apache and other servers.

As Nextcloud is nothing more than an PHP+Database web application it should be easy to deploy it on any Linux based system. All configuration is done in a single config.php and/or takes place in a quite tidy web UI.

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Stumbled over Installing and containing custom applications/software

I found https://ownyourbits.com/nextcloudpi/ has a script that configures a complete server on top of basic debian that might be if ... then... elsed to leave out what freedombox already has in place.

And there is a package for yunohost.

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Ups, Yunohost is based on Debian 9 (stretch), so would probably need to run in qemu/kvm.

My settings:


       _,met$$$$$gg.          
    ,g$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$P.       ------------------ 
  ,g$$P"     """Y$$.".        OS: Debian GNU/Linux 9 (stretch) aarch64 
 ,$$P'              `$$$.     Model: Hardkernel ODROID-C2 
',$$P       ,ggs.     `$$b:   Kernel: 4.18.8-odroidc2 
`d$$'     ,$P"'   .    $$$    Uptime: 225 days, 7 hours, 42 minutes 
 $$P      d$'     ,    $$P    Packages: 1169 
 $$:      $$.   -    ,d$$'    Shell: bash 4.4.12 
 $$;      Y$b._   _,d$P'      Resolution: 1360x768 
 Y$$.    `.`"Y$$$$P"'         WM: GNOME Shell 
 `$$b      "-.__              CPU: (4) @ 1.5GHz 
  `Y$$                        Memory: 456MB / 1976MB 
   `Y$$.                       
     `$$b.                    ████████████████████████ 
       `Y$$b.                  
          `"Y$b._ 
              `""" 

Today I finally received my bandwidth update (100MBit down / 40 up) and I can say that was the bottle neck. Now using it for e.g. Nextcloud Talk is no problem. I’m quite happy with it.

If I didn’t mention before:

Under no circumstances you should host it on the microSD! The syncing stresses the cards much so that you just have to wait for an fatal error that screws your system to hell.
Use armbian-config to move the system at once to an usb-hdd and only boot from microSD. And don’t forget a solution for backup. It cost me years of my life span to learn that the hard way the last years :roll_eyes:

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The goal would be to have Nextcloud as a FreedomBox app. It should be easy to install, like other apps in FreedomBox.

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I think that is an important point. Users will be disappointed the moment they loose all their data.

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Yes, sure, that 's why I’m considering to install the freedombox package in a slax.org environment as posted in the other thread.

Maybe it would not make sense for freedombox developers, to completely reimplement web-app installation scripts, if instead, many app sources could be moved (as lib packages?) into a debian repo, together with some slightly enhanced existing helper scripts…

…from upstream, or sending some patches or the cooperation idea upstream.

Reading the (upstream) FAQ (YunoHost • index):

Apps were packaged in .deb in the past. It was a nightmare. We’re happy now ;).

YunoHost aims to make packaging [web applications] easy. The idea from the beginning was to keep it as simple as « if you can install the app manually, then you can easily copy/paste steps into a basic install/remove package with no particular training ». This is not the case with Debian packages.

Turns out, YunoHost apps packaging holds a subtly different purpose than traditional packaging like .deb. Debian packages fulfill the low-level purpose of installing files, commands, programs and services on the system. It is often your duty to configure them properly, simply because there is no standard server setup. Typically, web apps requires a lot of configuration because they rely on a web server and a database (and the single sign-on).

YunoHost manipulates high-level abstractions (apps, domains, users, …) and defines a standard setup (Nginx, Postfix, Metronome, SSOwat, …) and, because of this, can handle the configuration for the user.

They have rules for creating scripts that use adaptable helper functions:
nextcloud_ynh/scripts at testing · YunoHost-Apps/nextcloud_ynh · GitHub

Has there been any traction on getting this app into the “main” apps? It seems like it should be an easy decision to get behind - since its predecessor (owncloud) was only removed from FreedomBox because it was dropped from Debian.

It goes without saying that this would benefit a great number of users.

Edit:
Sorry for the pointless bump, I thought nextcloud was in the Debian repos :frowning: considerable sadness.

NextCloud is in the road map for 2021.
https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox/Roadmap2021

Development efforts are currently focused on Jitsi Meet for video conferencing. The plan is to have at least an experimental version of NextCloud in the second half of this year.

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Awesome news! I had a FreedomBox running on port 80 and a Nextcloud snap instance on the same raspberry pi 4 for a short time span. Something updated and I lost the FreedomBox interface to Nextcloud taking port 80, I didn’t bother to set it back up. I ended up putting Nextcloud on a dedicated Pi. But that sounds awesome! FreedomBox is quickly becoming a brilliant and easy solution to ANYTHING internet related!

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