What are we doing here?

This blog includes a series of videos and references to help new users or enthusiasts better understand how to use open source and free technology tools. The quick links includes more information for accessing many of the tools covered along with other references to learn more for taking advantage of these tools.

Click HERE to see the full list of topics covered!

Nextcloud and Ansible

 

This tutorial is really more of a proof of concept of using Ansible and other scripts to more easily deploy Nextcloud from scratch. 

Ansible is an interesting tool for deploying and maintaining server systems. Very much like Docker, it uses YAML to build configuration files called Playbooks, and these Playbooks can be used to automate actions on the managed nodes in the cluster. 

In the deployment, as mentioned in the video, I do not deploy everything that's needed for Nextcloud. The Ansible Playbook doesn't even download and install Nextcloud. This is deliberate because I would think that nodes can be added, taken away, replaced, etc. and the Nextcloud config may want to reside in a more permanent storage environment. For this reason I offer a reference for getting NFS set up in Debian 12, and then mounting it to the web server. 

After the initial web server and Nextcloud install are complete, and the config.php file is modified as needed for Redis, Memcache, etc., subsequent updates and changes to web server nodes can be made. I even noticed, while recording, that I had missed memcached package in the yaml, but a quick change and re-running the configuration brought it in. 

The source for the Ansible playbook, as well as single-node scripts for installing Nextcloud from scratch is available on Github. 

https://github.com/JoeMrCoffee/AutomateManualNextcloudInstall/