IN THESE DAYS of password breaches and encroaching government agencies, how much do you trust any third party with your data? Cloud storage is baked into Windows with Microsoft’s OneDrive, but despite the generous 1TB of storage space with any subscription, how sure can you be that your data is truly beyond the reach of bad actors?
If you’d rather not trust the internet with your precious data, Nextcloud Hub is the solution for you. It offers the same features you find in any good cloud storage solution—backup and synchronization between all your devices—but goes further to add a secure self-hosted chat platform as well as private solutions for your contacts, calendar, and projects, all of which can be accessed on your phone as well as your desktop and laptop. There’s even a powerful web-based office suite—based on LibreOffice—that you can deploy to edit documents on the go.
Better still, you can sign up trusted friends and family to free accounts to give them access to your server, providing you with all the tools you need to chat, share, and collaborate on projects without worrying about who might be snooping on your data. It’s time to free your data from the tyranny of others. It’s time for Nextcloud.
BEFORE YOU BEGIN, you need a suitable server to host Nextcloud on. Our small server build from the September 2022 issue is perfect, but you can use any Windows, Linux, or macOS computer running Docker. For the purposes of this feature, though, we’ll assume you’re running Ubuntu Server on a headless small PC, accessed remotely through the Cockpit interface in your PC’s web browser. This means you can copy and paste commands from your text editor directly into Cockpit’s terminal, which saves no end of time.
We’re also going to assume you plan to access Nextcloud from outside your network, so you need a suitable domain or subdomain to point to your home’s public IP address. Use the ddclient container (https://docs.linuxserver.io/images/docker-ddclient) to ensure it keeps pointing home even when your public IP address changes, and use Nginx Proxy Manager (https://nginxproxymanager.com), which we featured on page 62 of the April 2023 issue, to set up a reverse proxy.
We’ve opted for the official Nextcloud AIO Docker container, too, which downloads and installs all required containers—as many as 13 depending on the components you choose.
Instructions for installing Nextcloud AIO are at https://github.com/nextcloud/all-in-one—ignore the standard setup and click the “Reverse-proxy.md” link for instructions. Configure your reverse proxy by expanding the Nginx-Proxy-Manager section.
Install Nextcloud
Now switch your attention to Nextcloud AIO. Copy and paste the code under “Use This Startup Command” into your
