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NextCloud

NextCloud (a fork of OwnCloud, led by original developer Frank Karlitschek) is a suite of client-server software for creating and using file hosting services. It is functionally similar to Dropbox, although Nextcloud is free and open-source, allowing anyone to install and operate it on a private server. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nextcloud

This recipe is based on the official NextCloud docker image, but includes seprate containers ofor the database (MariaDB), Redis (for transactional locking), Apache Solr (for full-text searching), automated database backup, (you do backup the stuff you care about, right?) and a separate cron container for running NextCloud's 15-min crons.

Ingredients

1. Docker swarm cluster with persistent shared storage
2. Traefik configured per design
3. DNS entry pointing your NextCloud url (nextcloud.example.com) to your keepalived IP

Preparation

Setup data locations

We'll need several directories for static data to bind-mount into our container, so create them in /var/data/nextcloud (so that they can be backed up)

mkdir /var/data/nextcloud
cd /var/data/nextcloud
mkdir -p {html,apps,config,data,database-dump}

Now make more directories for runtime data (so that they can be not backed-up):

mkdir /var/data/runtime/nextcloud
cd /var/data/runtime/nextcloud
mkdir -p {db,redis}

Prepare environment

Create nextcloud.env, and populate with the following variables

NEXTCLOUD_ADMIN_USER=admin
NEXTCLOUD_ADMIN_PASSWORD=FVuojphozxMVyaYCUWomiP9b
MYSQL_HOST=db

# For mysql
MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD=<set to something secure>
MYSQL_DATABASE=nextcloud
MYSQL_USER=nextcloud
MYSQL_PASSWORD=set to something secure>

Now create a separate nextcloud-db-backup.env file, to capture the environment variables necessary to perform the backup. (If the same variables are shared with the mariadb container, they cause issues with database access)

# For database backup (keep 7 days daily backups)
MYSQL_PWD=<set to something secure, same as MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD above>
MYSQL_USER=root
BACKUP_NUM_KEEP=7
BACKUP_FREQUENCY=1d

Setup Docker Swarm

Create a docker swarm config file in docker-compose syntax (v3), something like this:

Tip

I share (with my patreon patrons) a private "premix" git repository, which includes necessary docker-compose and env files for all published recipes. This means that patrons can launch any recipe with just a git pull and a docker stack deploy 👍

version: "3.0"

services:
  nextcloud:
    image: nextcloud
    env_file: /var/data/config/nextcloud/nextcloud.env
    networks:
      - internal
      - traefik_public
    deploy:
      labels:
        - traefik.frontend.rule=Host:nextcloud.example.com
        - traefik.docker.network=traefik_public
        - traefik.port=80
    volumes:
    - /var/data/nextcloud/html:/var/www/html
    - /var/data/nextcloud/apps:/var/www/html/custom_apps
    - /var/data/nextcloud/config:/var/www/html/config
    - /var/data/nextcloud/data:/var/www/html/data

  db:
    image: mariadb:10
    env_file: /var/data/config/nextcloud/nextcloud.env
    networks:
      - internal
    volumes:
      - /var/data/runtime/nextcloud/db:/var/lib/mysql

  db-backup:
    image: mariadb:10
    env_file: /var/data/config/nextcloud/nextcloud.env
    volumes:
      - /var/data/nextcloud/database-dump:/dump
      - /etc/localtime:/etc/localtime:ro
    entrypoint: |
      bash -c 'bash -s <<EOF
      trap "break;exit" SIGHUP SIGINT SIGTERM
      sleep 2m
      while /bin/true; do
        mysqldump -h db --all-databases | gzip -c > /dump/dump_\`date +%d-%m-%Y"_"%H_%M_%S\`.sql.gz
        (ls -t /dump/dump*.sql.gz|head -n $$BACKUP_NUM_KEEP;ls /dump/dump*.sql.gz)|sort|uniq -u|xargs rm -- {}
        sleep $$BACKUP_FREQUENCY
      done
      EOF'
    networks:
    - internal

  redis:
    image: redis:alpine
    networks:
      - internal
    volumes:
      - /var/data/runtime/nextcloud/redis:/data

  cron:
    image: nextcloud
    volumes:
      - /var/data/nextcloud/:/var/www/html
    user: www-data
    networks:
      - internal
    entrypoint: |
      bash -c 'bash -s <<EOF
        trap "break;exit" SIGHUP SIGINT SIGTERM
        while [ ! -f /var/www/html/config/config.php ]; do
          sleep 1
        done
        while true; do
          php -f /var/www/html/cron.php
          sleep 15m
        done
      EOF'

networks:
  traefik_public:
    external: true
  internal:
    driver: overlay
    ipam:
      config:
        - subnet: 172.16.12.0/24

Note

Setup unique static subnets for every stack you deploy. This avoids IP/gateway conflicts which can otherwise occur when you're creating/removing stacks a lot. See my list here.

Serving

Launch NextCloud stack

Launch the NextCloud stack by running docker stack deploy nextcloud -c <path -to-docker-compose.yml>

Log into your new instance at https://YOUR-FQDN, with user "admin" and the password you specified in nextcloud.env.

Adding full-text search support (optional)

Once logged in as an admin user, navigate to https:///index.php/settings/apps, and install the "nextant" app for full-text search

Then navigate to https:///index.php/settings/admin/additional, scroll down to Nextant (Full Text Search), and enter the following:

• Address of your solr servlet : http://solr:8983/solr/
• Core: nextant

Chef's Notes

1. Since many of my other recipes use PostgreSQL, I'd have preferred to use Postgres over MariaDB, but MariaDB seems to be the preferred database type.

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