Installing Nextcloud on an Ubuntu 16.04 LTS virtual machine

What is Nextcloud?

Nextcloud is a recent fork of ownCloud that’s already quickly becoming the newer, better and faster-developed alternative to the self-hosted cloud storage software of old. If you’re an ownCloud user and have ever been frustrated by the dual licenses, the paid vs free model and – as part of it – lack of some of the better features, Nextcloud have gone completely FOSS (free and open-source software) following the Red Hat model of charging for enterprise support rather than enterprise features.

Some of the previously enterprise-only features released as part of the standard FOSS Nextcloud installation include FileDrop, an alternative to Dropbox’s “File Requests” and LibreOffice online, an alternative to Google Docs or Office Online. Upcoming release v.10 will bring two-factor authentication, improved federation, and more.

In this guide

After completing this guide we’ll have the following:

• A newly installed Nextcloud 9.0.53 server
• PHP caching provided by ACPu and Redis for a notable speed increase when navigating even the largest thumbnail-heavy folders
• Pretty links that remove /index.php from the URL
• SSL-enabled with default self-signed certificates and all non-HTTPS traffic redirected

Environment

For this guide Nextcloud will be installed on a virtual machine with the following server spec:

Hardware

Nextcloud doesn’t go into a lot of detail for minimum recommended spec, only advising 512MB of RAM. We’ll provide a bit of a buffer to avoid any possible contention.

• 1GHz CPU
• 1GB RAM
• 20GB HDD

20GB of disk will be enough for this guide, but naturally, the amount chosen should reflect the amount of data to be stored. The disks on the ElasticHosts cloud are in a RAID 1 array which provides high redundancy due to mirroring, but no matter what level of redundancy is set up, it’s not a replacement for a good backup strategy.

Software

• Ubuntu server 16.04 LTS with root access
• Apache 2.4.18
• PHP 7.0
• mySQL 5.7.13
• Nextcloud 9.0.53

Due to the advanced requirements in this guide, root access to the 16.04 instance is mandatory.

Setting up the environment

For those with a functioning Ubuntu server and required components, please skip this section.

First, we need to spin up a virtual machine (VM). The first few steps will run through the configuration and imaging of the new server.

1. Spin up the virtual server

After logging into the ElasticHosts console, select Add followed by Server under Virtual Machines.

In the new modal, define the server spec to that listed under Hardware above.

For Type select Pre-installed system, for Image select Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus). Click Add when done.

2. Assign a static IP

On ElasticHosts, new servers are created with a dynamic IP. As we want to permanently assign a hostname to this server for web access to Nextcloud, we’ll assign a static IP. If one isn’t already assigned to the account, create a new static IP from the Add menu.

Once a static IP is available, enter the newly-created (and still powered-off) server settings by clicking the "cog" icon under the power button. This will open a new page.

Under Network select the static IP from the dropdown menu and click the relevant IP under Allowed IPs.

Click Save and Start to boot up the server for the first time.

At this point, it would be a good idea to create a DNS entry for the server. For this guide, we’ll use nc.bayton.org.

3. Connect to the server

After clicking Start the button will change to Connect. On clicking this, a new window will open with server connection details:

Using an SSH client, SSH to toor@IP (where IP is the IP address) and use the VNC/toor password provided.

Disable the root account

As soon as it’s convenient to do so, disable the root/toor account from logging in over SSH. A quick, simple way to do this in Ubuntu is to disable the account as follows from a different sudo-enabled account (which would need to be created first):

sudo passwd root -l

Furthermore, consider switching from password to key authentication as soon as possible.

4. Update the server & install LAMP, APCu, Redis

As this is a brand new installation based on images that don’t update very often, it’s a good idea to upgrade the server before we begin:

apt update && apt upgrade

When the update has completed, it’ll provide a list of packages to be upgraded. Providing we’re happy with what we see, tap Enter.

With the server updated, a non-root user created with sudo privileges and the root account disabled, we’ll now install the required components for Nextcloud:

sudo apt install lamp-server^

Note: The use of ^ (caret) in the package name is important. It suggests that the installed package is a ‘meta-package’. Meaning a number of programs that are usually installed together.

This command will install Apache 2, MySQL 5.7 and PHP 7.0 along with several PHP/Apache modules to ensure seamless collaboration between the packages. Once happy with the package selection to be installed, tap Enter.

MySQL will request a root user password. Ensure this is strong and keep the password safe; losing it can cause all manner of issues.

Once installed, we’ll now install APCu and Redis:

sudo apt install php-apcu redis-server php-redis

Confirm the packages to be installed match expectations and hit Enter.

Finally, we’ll install the minimal Nextcloud PHP modules required not to error during installation (more can be enabled later):

sudo apt install php-zip php-dompdf php-xml php-mbstring php-gd php-curl

And enable a few apache modules to support our configuration:

sudo a2enmod rewrite headers env dir mime

Now we’ll restart Apache:

sudo service apache2 restart

Before moving on check via a browser that Apache is up and running:

5. Enable SSL

With the server currently running over HTTP port 80, we can now additionally configure SSL to ensure the Nextcloud installation is secure.

We’ll begin by enabling the SSL module for Apache:

sudo a2enmod ssl

Apache sets up self-signed certificates as part of the installation, so for this guide, we’ll use those. They can be replaced at any time with functioning 3rd party certificates by editing the vhost file we’ll create next.

sudo vim /etc/apache2/sites-available/nextcloud.conf

Insert the following (all items in bold can be changed to suit the environment):

<IfModule mod_ssl.c>
   <VirtualHost _default_:443>

     ServerAdmin jason@bayton.org
     ServerName nc.bayton.org
     DocumentRoot /var/www/html

     <IfModule mod_headers.c>
          Header always set Strict-Transport-Security "max-age=15768000; preload"
     </IfModule>

     SSLEngine on
     SSLCertificateFile /etc/ssl/certs/ssl-cert-snakeoil.pem
     SSLCertificateKeyFile /etc/ssl/private/ssl-cert-snakeoil.key

   </VirtualHost>
</IfModule>

Save and quit, then enable the new configuration:

sudo a2ensite nextcloud.conf

Then restart Apache:

sudo service apache2 restart

SSL should now be enabled, allowing us to navigate to https://nc.bayton.org when we install Nextcloud later.

Optionally, we can also force a redirect from non-SSL to SSL with the following:

sudo vim /etc/apache2/sites-available/nc-redir.conf

Insert the following (all items in bold can be changed to suit the environment):

<VirtualHost *:80>
   ServerName nc.bayton.org
   ServerAdmin jason@bayton.org

   RewriteEngine On
   RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off
   RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://%{HTTP_HOST}$1 [R=301,L]
</VirtualHost>

Save and quit, then enable the new configuration:

sudo a2ensite nc-redir.conf

Then restart Apache:

sudo service apache2 restart

With that, all traffic will be forced to HTTPS.

Install Nextcloud

With the server environment ready (excluding some final NC-related configurations) we’ll move on to installing Nextcloud itself.

1. Download Nextcloud

Change to the webroot directory at /var/www/html with cd /var/www/html

Download Nextcloud via command line with sudo wget https://download.nextcloud.com/server/releases/nextcloud-9.0.53.tar.bz2
NB: future versions can be obtained from Nextcloud.

Unpack the compressed tar.bz2 with sudo tar -xvjf nextcloud-9.0.53.tar.bz2

As shown above with ls there’s now a nextcloud folder situated under /var/www/html/ but currently, root owns it. We can change that:

sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/html/nextcloud

Now the Apache account, www-data, will have write-access to the Nextcloud installation directory.

2. Create the Nextcloud database

By default, Nextcloud can create a database and database user when supplying the root user and password in the Nextcloud web-based installer. The following steps are intended for either someone who wants to create their own database or does not want to supply Nextcloud with the root account credentials.

Before switching to Chrome to run the web-based installer, we’ll first create a database.

We can open a session with MySQL by running the command mysql -u root -p and providing the root password we entered earlier.

Now we’ll create a dedicated database and user for Nextcloud with the following commands:

CREATE DATABASE nextcloud;
CREATE USER 'ncuser'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'ncpassword';
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON nextcloud . * TO 'ncuser'@'localhost';

Then exit the mysql session with quit.

3. Install Nextcloud

Open up a browser and navigate to ip-or-hostname/nextcloud. Hopefully, by this point a DNS entry has propagated; we’ll navigate to nc.bayton.org/nextcloud to continue installation.

Success! The Nextcloud installation screen is there and showing no errors. Installation from here is simple:

1. Provide a username and secure password for the admin account.
2. Select a location for the data directory.
3. Provide the database user we configured earlier: ncuser
4. Provide the database user password: ncpassword
5. Provide the database name: nextcloud
6. Confirm the database is on localhost (it is).

When selecting a location for the data directory, keeping it in the webroot is OK, providing .htaccess rules work. If they do not, as is the case at this point due to the way Apache is setup by default, the data directory will be publicly visible. We don’t want that. If the data directory is situated outside of the webroot, ensure the user www-data can write to it in its final location.

Scroll down and click Finish Setup.

Configuration

As it stands currently, Nextcloud isn’t very happy.

1. Enable .htaccess

The .htaccess file doesn’t work because we’ve put Nextcloud in the main /var/www/html webroot controlled by the apache.conf file. By default,m it is set to disallow .htaccess overrides and we’ll need to change that:

sudo vim /etc/apache2/apache2.conf

Then change

<Directory /var/www/>        
        Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
        AllowOverride None
        Require all granted
</Directory>

To

<Directory /var/www/>
        Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
        AllowOverride All
        Require all granted
</Directory>

Save and quit, then restart Apache with:

sudo service apache2 restart

2. Enable caching

The difference in speed between a Nextcloud server without cache and one with is huge. Particularly as the file and folder counts increase and more multimedia files make their way onto the server, caching becomes increasingly important for maintaining speed and performance. Having installed both APCu and Redis earlier, we’ll now configure them.

First, open the Redis configuration file at /etc/redis/redis.conf with your preferred text editor (we will use vim):

sudo vim /etc/redis/redis.conf

Now, find and change:

port 6370 to port 0

Then uncomment:

unixsocket /var/run/redis/redis.sock

unixsocketperm 700 while changing permissions to 770 at the same time: unixsocketperm 770

Save and quit, then add the Redis user redis to the www-data group:

sudo usermod -a -G redis www-data

Finally, restart Apache with:

sudo service apache2 restart

And start Redis server with:

sudo service redis-server start

With Redis configured, we can add the caching configuration to the Nextcloud config file:

sudo vim /var/www/html/nextcloud/config/config.php

Add the following:

'memcache.local' => '\OC\Memcache\APCu',
'memcache.locking' => '\\OC\\Memcache\\Redis',
'filelocking.enabled' => 'true',
'redis' => 
array (
'host' => '/var/run/redis/redis.sock',
'port' => 0,
'timeout' => 0.0,
),

A reboot may be required before the configuration change takes effect, but before we do we’ll make sure Redis is enabled to start on boot with:

sudo systemctl enable redis-server

Caching is now configured.

With both of these now resolved, the admin interface is looking a lot healthier:

3. Pretty links

Much like theming, pretty links aren’t mandatory, but they add to the overall aesthetics of the server.

Most of the hard work was already done during the setup of the environment with the enabling of mod_env and mod_rewrite, however, to complete the removal of index.php in every URL, re-open the Nextcloud config file:

sudo vim /var/www/html/nextcloud/config/config.php

Add 'htaccess.RewriteBase' => '/nextcloud', (where nextcloud is the location of the installation) below one of the existing configuration options and finally, from /var/www/html/nextcloud, run:

sudo -u www-data php occ maintenance:update:htaccess

From:

To (don’t simply refresh the page, remove index.php from the URL and load the page again, otherwise it looks like it doesn’t work):

4. Max upload

Until we try to upload files this is easy to miss. By default PHP ships with a file-upload limitation reminiscent of file sizes in the early 2000’s – 2MB. As we’re installing a personal cloud that may hold on to files gigabytes in size, we can change the PHP configuration to allow far more flexibility.

Open the php.ini file:

sudo vim /etc/php/7.0/apache2/php.ini

Locate and amend:

upload_max_filesize = 2048M
post_max_size = 2058M

The max size can be tweaked to suit, however be sure to always give post_max_size a bit more than upload_max_filesize to prevent errors when uploading files that match the maximum allowed upload size.

Restart Apache:

sudo service apache2 restart

Conclusion

So following this guide we now have a new virtual server running Nextcloud 9.0.53 on Ubuntu 16.04 supporting both caching and pretty links.

While this is yet another long-winded guide, as usual, there’s nothing here I would consider to be overly complex which, for a platform that empowers self-hosting data, is a big plus over other solutions.

Want to know more about Nextcloud? Visit nextcloud.com or their thriving support community at help.nextcloud.com.

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I hope this guide has been helpful, as always I’m @jasonbayton on Twitter, @bayton.org on Facebook and will also respond to comments below if you have any questions.

If you spot any errors in the above or have suggestions on how to improve this guide, feel free to reach out.
The tutorial was originally published on bayton.org.