Status NextCloud as App?

What is the status of the NextCloud integration as App in FreedomBox?

I was unable to find much in https://salsa.debian.org/freedombox-team/freedombox

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There have been no reports of experiments done with NextCloud. It would of great help if various people who have setup NextCloud on their FreedomBoxes post their configuration, use cases, test reports, upgrade mechanisms, client information, backup setup, etc.

We agreed to do NextCloud integration using either by packaging into newly proposed Debian fast moving repository or by using a container (currently only given as exception to NextCloud) like snap.

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Whoah! That would be awesome!!

I made a wiki page, to get an idea of the scope of packaging Nextcloud:
https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox/Contribute/Packaging/Nextcloud

Hi,
my attempts to install and use nextcloud haven’t been so positive,
slow and unfortunately there was always something going wrong after a while.

I’d like to try out the pydio re-write called “cells”, but it’s not yet available for arm32,
only x86 and now also arm64 (https://download.pydio.com/pub/cells/dev/linux-arm64/).

But installing the pre-build binary seems easy.
https://pydio.com/en/docs/cells/v2/debianubuntu-systems

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That 4GB requirement just for “cells” seems huge, though, if it really is for real.

Cells Installation | Pydio
Server Capacity : 2 Core CPU - 64bit, 4GB RAM, SSD is also recommended for storage.

Maybe somebody can provide some practical results.

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On what device did you try to run Nextcloud? Single Board Computer or VM? What does slow mean for you?

Can you make an announcement or contributor invite regarding Nextcloud experiments and configurations?

Note, that I did not try any current version, and there are certainly happy users.
It was that for me it did not feel as the desired solution to me, and had recurring issues, e.g. with large file support and syncing.

It was on shared hosting (owncloud times), RPi3, and odroid HC (much better LAMP stack response times, but still).
It took for example time to sync changes made on the external local filesystem, and things like thumbnails building up stuck.

Thanks, I tried to use OwnCloud on a RPI1 and it was quite slow.

I think it depends what you expect. I would see NextCloud for those users who need a storage solution with web interface. I think Samba is much better suited for large files and Syncthing the solution to sync files. Both Samba and Syncthing are already in the FreedomBox as Apps.

My personal expectation is to use Nextcloud to host some ebooks, documents or other files I want to share between my phone and computers. I also want to use Nextcloud to share files with other people.

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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