Nextcloud in Docker!

So this is something I've been debating for a while - stick with a pure SMB share or try setting up Nextcloud.

Nextcloud is essentially local, open source, on-prem Dropbox with an ever growing feature set. It trumps SMB (a local Windows or Linux SAMBA file share) in many regards with things like apps for iOS / Android, calendar sync, email sync, and more. 

It's far more complicated than SMB or a generic NAS share in many respects, but that honestly makes it more easy to use for the end user - simply go to the local site or IP on the LAN, enter credentials and begin using it. 

I set this up using Docker and I wanted to share the experience. 

Using the official Docker Hub information was fine - essentially being able to test something easy in a single command.

$ docker run -d -p 8080:80 nextcloud

After running that in docker (likely will need sudo to grant permissions when running in Linux) you can just log in using your browser <server / computer IP>:8080.

That works, but isn't ideal. Nextcloud will tell you to change the database from their default sqlite to another - better, or more comprehensive - database immediately. 

For better use there is the docker-compose suggestion on the Docker hub Nextcloud page. I followed and tweaked that. It works really well, but there are some things to watch for. 

Modified docker-compose

    *Update* This is also now on GitHub: NextCloudDockerCompose

My version of the docker-compose file changes the following: 

• Update the version of docker compose to 3, 
• Adjust the way persistent volumes are defined to a local file folder vs the generic persistent file folder in the reference, 
• Changed the restart preference to 'unless-stopped' in case you do need to stop the container it won't keep restarting (it should restart on a device/VM reboot) 
• Add names to both the MariaDB and Nextcloud containers. That last bit makes it a bit easier to manage when you want to restart or interact the container.

Save the file in a folder as docker-compose.yml, adjust the passwords and directories/folders to your needs then run docker-compose up -d and it should run.

When I initially started this it worked well, but on first login I ran into an issue due to the way MariaDB was handling the input from Nextcloud. This might be my luck or just the age of the Nextcloud docker container post. I found this workaround which solved the issue:

Wayne's garden - essentially running the below command in the MariaDB (MySQL DB) solves the issue.

Enter command line in the MariaDB container:

sudo docker exec -it nxtclouddb bash

Then enter the MySQL instance (MariaDB still uses MySQL commands)

mysql -u root -p

Enter the MySQL root password set in the docker-compose file.

Then run this in the MariaDB server:

SET GLOBAL innodb_read_only_compressed=OFF;

This is also linked in this Reddit post (Wayne links to this as well).

That essentially worked for me so my docker-compose file was set, and with that additional work on the MariaDB container I was able to get to work. For now, my wife and her iPad haven't complained that I know of when backing up files. 

The other nice thing about defining a specific data store (volume) in the container, means you can do other things to back that up with more ease. What I did on the system was run a simple cp -u command to back up the data defined in the volume parameters (the parts in the <> brackets under -volumes) .

Feel free to add you own passwords and local volumes. The docker-compose should bring up a Nextcloud instance without issues beyond the MariaDB issue I just highlighted. I'll try to do a more detailed video on the bring up and advantages of Nextcloud in the near future after some more use. 

Thanks for reading, hope it helps, stay safe, and take care.

*Update and additional notes*

Since creating the video I tried to reproduce these steps in Alpine, Linux Mint and Fedora Silverblue (that using podman-compose, not docker-compose),(see below update) and all failed - at least per the above steps. If you are using the straight-up docker run -d -p 8080:80 nextcloud that should work on all, but docker-compose seems a bit more finicky so Ubuntu worked better out of the box.

Also to note, I did run into some issues with docker getting installed as a Snap in Ubuntu (this happened because I selected to install Docker during the installation of the Ubuntu Server 20.04 VM, but docker-compose is not a snap). That caused me issues after removing the containers manually using docker rm <container name> vs first running docker-compose down. Best in my experience to install both docker and docker-compose using the recommended setup steps from Docker themselves.

All quite technical, but if you are following these steps and want the simplest way to get up an running with Nextcloud, just use Ubuntu 20.04 + Docker + Docker-compose. The above scripts tweaked to your environment and all should work fine.

*Update on Fedora and Podman-compose*  

I persisted a bit longer with Fedora Silverblue as I really like Podman - it just is easy to use out of the box and can run without root access. Over a weekend I poked and prodded a bit more which made me realize I made the same mistake twice now; I forgot about SELinux. Fedora, unlike Ubuntu has SELinux enabled by default. In order to mount a volume in either Podman or Docker, one must waive the SELinux permissions if SELinux if running on the system. It's a simple :z in the volume command, but I had totally overlooked that point. 

Once I added that it worked fine - same work around for mariadb as above (I picked the Docker repositories for the mariadb and nextcloud container images), - but then essentially the same in my limited testing.

Updated the config file for users who may run into SELinux or want SELinux equipped systems.

Modified docker-compsoe for Nextcloud on SELinux systems

Once that is save as a docker-compose.yml file on your directory of choice, and the appropriate data and datadb directories are passed, just run podman-compose up -d similar to Docker. 

Podman-compose works slightly differently in the sense that it creates a pod (group of containers, used in Kubernetes (k8s)) rather than simply a new network for the containers. However, it works fine in this instance and assumingly many others - here is an example with Wordpress. 

For stablity and ease of use, I'd probably still recommend an LTS (long-term support) version of Ubuntu, but I wanted to highlight that podman-compose is also just as capable, and honestly the promises of Silverblue also make it an interesting platform for container workloads like Nextcloud.

Thanks again.