The complete guide to installing Nextcloud on Debian 10

2,820 Comments / By / 2020-02-24

Today we’re installing the free and open source cloud platform Nextcloud on a machine running Debian 10. Nextcloud is, in a nutshell, a secure self-hosted replacement for Dropbox, Google Docs and Google Calendar. You should own your data – not the big companies. The guide somewhat resembles the WordPress how-to – as we did then we set up a database, a web server and a website written in PHP that is meant to sit behind a reverse proxy giving it a secure connection to the internet.

Just a note: there are more simple ways of doing this, either by using Docker (link here) or by using Snaps (link here) – but you won’t get the same ability to tweak, configure or add third party apps. And most importantly, you won’t learn how it works.

I. The Database

We start off with installing a relational database management system.

apt -y install mariadb-server mariadb-client

Then we set it up, use a long secure password for the root user.

mysql_secure_installation

Now it’s time to create the database and database user Nextcloud will be using.

mysql -u root -p
CREATE USER 'nextcloud_user'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'super-secure-password';
CREATE DATABASE nextcloud_db;
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON nextcloud_db.* TO 'nextcloud_user'@'localhost';
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
QUIT

II. The Web Server

Since Nextcloud is written in PHP, we have to install it (and some extensions).

apt -y install php php-{cli,xml,zip,curl,gd,cgi,mysql,mbstring,imagick,intl}

The last thing we have to install is our web server that will be hosting our Nextcloud instance.

apt -y install apache2 libapache2-mod-php

With that done we have to make a few adjustments to the PHP settings, search for and replace the following values in /etc/php/7.3/apache2/php.ini.

nano /etc/php/7.3/apache2/php.ini
date.timezone = Europe/Stockholm
memory_limit = 512M
upload_max_filesize = 500M
post_max_size = 500M
max_execution_time = 300

It’s time to download the latest version of Nextcloud (at the time of writing it is 18).

wget https://download.nextcloud.com/server/releases/latest-18.zip
unzip latest-18.zip

Then we place it in our website folder (by default /var/www/html) and change the permissions, but first we delete the default website Apache installed.

rm /var/www/html/index.html

cd nextcloud/
mv * /var/www/html/
mv .htaccess /var/www/html/
mv .user.ini /var/www/html/

chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/html
chmod -R 755 /var/www/html

Since it’s more secure not storing your data in a subfolder to /var/www we create a dedicated folder for Nextcloud data outside of it.

mkdir /nextcloud-data
chown -R www-data:www-data /nextcloud-data

Now we edit our Apache configuration so that it looks something like this – use your own email and website address.

nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/nextcloud.conf
<VirtualHost *:80>
	# The ServerName directive sets the request scheme, hostname and port that
	# the server uses to identify itself. This is used when creating
	# redirection URLs. In the context of virtual hosts, the ServerName
	# specifies what hostname must appear in the request's Host: header to
	# match this virtual host. For the default virtual host (this file) this
	# value is not decisive as it is used as a last resort host regardless.
	# However, you must set it for any further virtual host explicitly.
	#ServerName www.example.com

	ServerAdmin replaceme@email.com
	DocumentRoot /var/www/html
        ServerName replaceme.com

        <Directory /var/www/html/>
            Options +FollowSymlinks
            AllowOverride All
            Require all granted
                <IfModule mod_dav.c>
                    Dav off
                </IfModule>
            SetEnv HOME /var/www/html
            SetEnv HTTP_HOME /var/www/html
        </Directory>

	# Available loglevels: trace8, ..., trace1, debug, info, notice, warn,
	# error, crit, alert, emerg.
	# It is also possible to configure the loglevel for particular
	# modules, e.g.
	#LogLevel info ssl:warn

	ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error.log
	CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access.log combined

	# For most configuration files from conf-available/, which are
	# enabled or disabled at a global level, it is possible to
	# include a line for only one particular virtual host. For example the
	# following line enables the CGI configuration for this host only
	# after it has been globally disabled with "a2disconf".
	#Include conf-available/serve-cgi-bin.conf
</VirtualHost>

Then we activate our configuration and enable some needed Apache modules with the following commands.

unlink /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default.conf
ln -s /etc/apache2/sites-available/nextcloud.conf /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/

a2enmod rewrite
a2enmod headers
a2enmod env
a2enmod dir
a2enmod mime

systemctl restart apache2

If your IP address for the server is 192.168.1.50 and your website address is example.com, you have to do the following edits to the Nextcloud config in order to be able to access the website.

nano /var/www/html/config/config.php
  'trusted_domains' => 
  array (
    0 => '192.168.1.50',
    1 => 'example.com',
    2 => 'www.example.com',
  ),

The website is now accessible! Head over to it by writing the servers IP address in your browser (http://192.168.1.50 in our example case). Use the database account we created (nextcloud_user), the database (nextcloud_db) and our data folder (/nextcloud-data).

We could now say that we’re finished, but we are not! There still is some tweaks to be made…

III. Additional Fixes

If you head to http://your-ip-address/settings/admin/overview you can see if there are some errors. One I got was:

The database is missing some indexes. Due to the fact that adding indexes on big tables could take some time they were not added automatically. By running “occ db:add-missing-indices” those missing indexes could be added manually while the instance keeps running. Once the indexes are added queries to those tables are usually much faster.

This was fixed with the following commands.

cd /var/www/html/
apt install sudo
sudo -u www-data php occ db:add-missing-indices

Another error I got was:

Some columns in the database are missing a conversion to big int. Due to the fact that changing column types on big tables could take some time they were not changed automatically. By running ‘occ db:convert-filecache-bigint’ those pending changes could be applied manually. This operation needs to be made while the instance is offline. For further details read the documentation page about this.

This was fixed with:

sudo -u www-data php occ db:convert-filecache-bigint

Then in order to get “pretty URL:s” we edit the Nextcloud config.

nano /var/www/html/config/config.php
  'overwrite.cli.url' => 'http://example.com',
  'overwritehost'     => 'example.com',
  'htaccess.RewriteBase' => '/',

Then we update Nextcloud with our new settings.

cd /var/www/html/
sudo -u www-data php occ maintenance:update:htaccess

We’re almost done, but first we have to change how Nextcloud handles background tasks from using ajax to cron. We do this by adding a cronjob and then changing it in the website settings (http://your-ip-address/settings/admin).

crontab -u www-data -e
*/5  *  *  *  * php -f /var/www/html/cron.php

The final step in our journey is to set up caching, it will greatly improve the performance of your cloud. The caching solution we will be using is APCu, let’s install it!

apt install php-apcu
systemctl restart apache2

After installing APCu we have to enable it, by writing the following in /var/www/html/config/config.php.

nano /var/www/html/config/config.php
  'memcache.local' => '\OC\Memcache\APCu',

Then we enable it in the PHP settings by adding a line to /etc/php/7.3/apache2/php.ini.

nano /etc/php/7.3/apache2/php.ini
apc.enable_cli=1

And that is it! You are now the owner of your very own cloud. 🙂

P.S. if you find something wrong with the guide please tell me so I can fix it!

2,820 thoughts on “The complete guide to installing Nextcloud on Debian 10”

  2. ben

    Looks great

    I have nextcloud already for myself
    But I have a question. What is the reason for switch from ajax to Cron?

    Thanks

    Reply
    1. albin

      The downside being AJAX requires regular visits to the page to trigger the background job, a Cron job works all the time.

      Reply
  3. Slevin

    When i strictly follow this guide on debian 10 inside a proxmox lxc i cant get past the first login screen.
    I get an internal server error and the trusted domains array is showing on top of the page accesing it via local ip adress Oo

    Reply
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  5. Airless

    Thanks for putting this together. I followed your steps and ran in an few issue caused by the last steps.
    – Adding your trusted domains to the config.php needs to be done after you first navigate to the installation page and enter your DB info, etc… In Nextcloud 18.0.2.2 there is no config.php until you complete the web installation steps.

    I’m betting SLEVIN did what I did and made a copy of the config.php.sample, made the edits you suggested and received server errors because the sample config uses different dependencies than your setup.

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