I’ve tried NextCloud before and didn’t really love it and I’m now happy with a combination of syncthing and LibreOffice. But my wife wants the full google drive, with sheets, docs etc. without the google, and I think NextCloud is my best option for that.
I’m and experienced *nix admin and already have a Linux server running with both VMs and docker containers and also have a working OpenVPN setup for remote access. But I found the NextCloud setup frustrating. We had a discussion about it (here I think) and determined that this was because NextCloud would rather sell their hosted service, so they don’t go out of their way to make the self hosted option easy. I get that and don’t hold it against them at all.
But, now that I’m wanting to try it again, I’m looking for pointers to guides for setting up self hosted NextCloud. I’ve searched, but nothing I found seemed like “the one”.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters DNS Domain Name Service/System LXC Linux Containers SSO Single Sign-On VPS Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting) nginx Popular HTTP server
5 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 7 acronyms.
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I ran it manually installed for years in a vm, then an LXC. It broke…a lot.
Then I ran it as docker containers with MySQL for a few years. It broke…less-ish.
Then I ran the AIO container. It was (and is) quite irritating because it’s so opinionated compared to regular docker containers. However, it hasn’t broken. It works pretty well. It’s faster than my old install and the office stuff seems to work better. However…want to do something different to the way Nextcloud AIO recommends? Nah, fuck you go kludge something together. You kinda have to do stuff their way, including things like backups.
It’s annoying to have all my other compose containers work with volumes and similar settings and Nextcloud be kinda its own thing, but I’m sticking with the AIO container. Takes a while to set up, but at least the documentation can’t be accused of being sparse.
That’s been my experience anyway. I’m sure smarter people than me have managed to bend it to their will a bit more.
I feel like I’ve never heard anything but complaints about the all-in-one image.
On the other hand, I’ve been using the community maintained docker image for a few years with minimal issues.
Here’s me being the first to tell you that AIO works great for me. Installation was super easy on Linux, and not so bad on synology. Updating the containers is only 2 buttons, so that’s easy as well.
I setup nextcloud for the first time last week. I used AIO in docker and I didn’t have any major issues. Minor things here and there as i actually learned what I was doing and how to use it, but it’s been fine so far.
In the interface I just chose talk, talk recording, and whiteboard (though i don’t expect to ever use whiteboard). Then the rest was just me playing around in the settings and in the apps page.
Oauth things like Google or Microsoft integration are a pain but that’s because of those companies so i only have Google in a partially working state and no apple login or onedrive syncing. I also used smtp2go in the free plan to get email notifications.
It wasn’t a short setup, but it didn’t have a ton of problems either.


