Install and Configure Nextcloud

NOTE: This guide assumes you have already set up Yunohost for your self-hosted software needs.

Nextcloud is another great citizen in the open source software community. The Nextcloud team has put together an amazing set of productivity apps for both web and mobile. Just like Yunohost, Nextcloud offers a central “marketplace” of open source software. In particular, Nextcloud offers great solutions for:

• file synchronization and sharing
• collaborative document editing
• calendaring, scheduling and contacts (to support Thunderbird)
• internal company chat
• basic task/project management

Setting up Nextcloud is made easy-peasy thanks to Yunohost. Just look up “Nextcloud” in the Yunohost marketplace and click “Install”! (Make sure to use the nextcloud.yourdomain.tld domain you set up earlier.)

Install and Configure Nextcloud Apps

Once you’ve installed Nextcloud, you’ll still need to install apps from the Nextcloud marketplace. In particular, I recommend the following:

• Calendar
• Collabora¹
• Contacts
• Talk
• Tasks

Collabora requires a document server which you can easily install from Yunohost.

Configure Nextcloud Email

Next, you’ll probably want your Nextcloud instance to send out email for things like adding attendees to meetings. For that, you’ll need to add your outgoing email settings under “Settings > Administration/Basic Settings > Email server” with the following selections:

• SMTP with STARTTLS
• authentication method: Login/ required
• server address: yourdomain.tld : 587
• enter your user credentials

Advanced

Occasionally it may be useful to execute tasks with the Nextcloud command line tool on your Yunohost instance. This is a little tricky and requires you to run the command line tool as the nextcloud user with the appropriate version of PHP and a special flag. You can create an alias for this command in ~/.bash_aliases, like so:

alias occ="sudo -u nextcloud php8.0 --define apc.enable_cli=1 /var/www/nextcloud/occ"

1. While current versions of Nextcloud ship with an ONLYOFFICE document server, at the time of writing, this integration did not function properly with document versioning.