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”.
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.
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 found Nextcloud all in one pretty easy to install, and it’s been very stable and simple to keep running. Been up for about a year now.
It’s the nextcloud ux that I find kinda frustrating for a family use case. It’s got a hundred features you don’t want, and the ones you want don’t work as well as you’d expect them to. For example, calendar cannot subscribe to external calendars, which is oddly limiting. I don’t uses photos, I don’t use talk, and I don’t use it for mail, presence, messaging, or or most of the other stuff bundled into it. I use files, Collabora office, and notes. And while collabora is reasonably functional on desktop, it’s pretty bad on mobile. if she’s used to gdocs, and expects something similar, she’s probably not gonna like it.
Most of the mobile “office” use will be to view stuff that’s maintained on desktop. I hope it can handle that?
Yeah. Not as polished or functional, but it can do that.
If she’s supportive of the change for the right reasons, it’ll probabky be fine. If she’s being dragged into this against her will, expect some resistance. :-)
I’ve gotten the calendar to subscribe to external calendars. One work related Microsoft calendar, and one for holidays.
Sorry, I didn’t describe my issue properly… Nextcloud can indeed subscribe to external calendars, but read only. This requires you to use a different app/interface to modify or update events on the external calendar, and if you need two calendar apps, it’s not a particularly useful solution IMO. There are other calendars without this limitation (in fact I think every other calendar I’ve used recently). It’s possible that I’m wrong, but it does say right in the Nextcloud interface that it’s read only. If there’s a way around this limitation, I’d live to hear it.
Yeah its read only, but I don’t have to edit the calendars I’m subscribed to, so it works for me.
But it would be mildly annoying if I had to edit stuff in those. I’m not sure how that would work in the first place. In my case Microsoft would have to have some sort of API, even if its just CALDav, so Nextcloud could submit the changes you make. Does Microsoft even allow for something like that?
it’s useful if you share a calendar with a friend/family member/business partner that’s in a different ecosystem like Google, apple, CalDav, etc… It has worked seamlessly for me, which is why the limitation surprised me.
I run nextcloud in a podman pod because I’m coocoo bananas that way. It uses authentik as an SSO provider using the nextcloud OIDC plugin. And I use the linuxserver.io container rather than the official nextcloud one because gosh darn it , it actually works
[Pod] PodName=nextcloud PublishPort=10443:443 PublishPort=9980:9980Nextcloud-db.container
Description=db Wants=network-online.target After=network-online.target [Service] Restart=always [Container] Pod=nextcloud.pod ContainerName=nextcloud-db Image=docker.io/library/mariadb:11 AutoUpdate=registry Volume=nextcloud-db.volume:/var/lib/mysql:Z Environment=MARIADB_HOST=nextcloud Environment=MARIADB_DATABASE=nextcloud Environment=MARIADB_USER=nextcloud Environment=MARIADB_PASSWORD=nextcloud Environment=MARIADB_ROOT_PASSWORD=nextcloud [Install] WantedBy=default.targetNextcloud-app.container
[Unit] Description=Nextcloud Wants=network-online.target After=network-online.target [Service] Restart=always [Container] #Label=app=nextcloud ContainerName=nextcloud-app Pod=nextcloud.pod Image=lscr.io/linuxserver/nextcloud:latest AutoUpdate=registry Volume=nextcloud-config.volume:/config:Z #Volume=nextcloud-data.volume:/data:Z Volume=/home/nextcloud/:/data:Z Environment=TZ=America/New_York Environment=PUID=1000 Environment=PGID=1000 #PublishPort=10443:443 [Install] WantedBy=default.targetNextcloud-office.container
[Unit] Description=Nextcloud-office Wants=network-online.target After=network-online.target [Service] Restart=always [Container] #Label=app=nextcloud ContainerName=nextcloud-office Pod=nextcloud.pod Image=docker.io/collabora/code:latest AutoUpdate=registry Environment=server_name=office.app.myserver.org Environment=aliasgroup1="https://nextcloud.app.myserver.org/" [Install] WantedBy=default.targetAlways nice to see podman used well! Do you have a dedicated user or is it rootful?
many of the linuxserver containers don’t work rootless. i didn’t have luck when i tried it as a user service
Interesting, do you remember which didn’t work? I recently set up a simple service (navidrome) as rootless podman with an ansible script, but it was… there were some hoops to jump through, mainly with the uid/gid and machinectl to get it to work.
the only linuxserver containers I run are nextcloud and plex. both are running as rootful containers. I also tried their calibre-web container (no longer using it), which didn’t work as rootless, but worked fine as a rootful container.
most of my other non-linuxserver applications are working just fine rootless. so clearly a linuxserver thing.
I cannot speak to collaborative editing of documents, but I do run my own docker-based nextcloud server for my own data.
I use nextcloud for:
- files
- photos (via
memoriesapp) - contacts
- calendar
- tasks
- notes
I am not using the AIO
dockerimage, I am using thenextcloud:APP_VERSIONimage, withAPP_VERSIONbeing33currently, preparing to upgrade to34. My SSL-certificate is done vianginx-proxy-manager, as it was easy to setup on a different VM and it acts as a gateway to my internal services.Syncing files, contacts and calendar works very well with my Graphene OS Pixel 9a (via the F-Droid App
DAVx5, as well as my EndeavourOS desktop. The only thing I can really complain about is the documentation for selfhosting, as it seems to be missing some info. Or maybe I just didn’t find it.If you’re interested, I can share my setup consisting of
docker-compose.ymlforlocaltestsdocker-compose.production.ymlforproductionandstagingdeployDockerfilefor nextcloud +croncontainer (though I may replace this withofelia)- Starter-Script for
localtests - GitLab CI pipeline for
productionandstagingdeploy
It may be a bit over-engineered though.
I run nextcloud in a collection of vms, nginx with SSL offloading, php-fpm, mariaDB and a docker host. Its rock solid and is a full google replacment, with office and even an RSS reader.
https://homelab.horwood.biz/?nextcloud
Please let me know if you need more words
Nice blog. Bookmarked.
Nextcloud AIO container runs pretty much without fuss on my VPS, but I don’t use the office features, just file syncing/sharing, contacts and calendar
I am hosting a NC container in docker with collabora behind traefik. Works nice, but collabora sometimes breaks due to updates (e.g. forbidden characters). NC itself is smooth though.
From what I’ve gathered about Nextcloud, they seem to be a fast paced rolling release model, which breaks often due to their pace.
Since I didn’t want to handhold it constantly, their
forks— upstream and fork — drew my attention, OwnCloud and OpenCloud — fork from OwnCloud infinitescale — I went with OpenCloud, due to the smaller footprint required.I’m currently using systemd container services built from the “full” docker compose version. The services I’m hosting are: OpenCloud server, Caddy as a reverse proxy and automatic cert renew, Keycloak for IDM, Collabora office, Apache Tika full version for text search and extraction and Radicale for contacts and calendar. They also recently updated to support EuroOffice.
While it has less features than NextCloud, it runs fine on a 4-core 8GB VPS, though it needs swap when starting for the first time or updating.
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.
[Thread #25 for this comm, first seen 23rd Jun 2026, 21:00] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
I currently run the official Nextcloud-AIO. No issues once I got the reverse proxy figured out. That was a bit of a pain at the time. Caddy hadn’t yet become a popular choice for reverse proxies.
I will say that Nextcloud really wants dedicated hardware, not a VM, or proformance will suffer. Still useable but it tends to to be a bit slower. Can’t vouch for the office suite as I just don’t use it.
I tried the AIO docker build I never got the file sync working at an acceptable level. Would be using piss all resources and still only syncing a few files a second.
Does installing bare metal make it faster, or is that not what you meant?
From what I’ve noticed, yes. Considerably.
I’m not knowledgeable enough to explain why, but something about running Baremetal --> VM --> Docker --> Nextcloud-AIO is massively slower than running Baremetal --> Docker --> Nextcloud-AIO. Hell, Nextcloud-AIO on a Pi4 was running faster than when I put it in a much roomier VM.
Someone tried to explain it to me but all I understood was that the databases don’t like that. Something about nested virtualization restricting performance.
Oddly I didn’t run into the same issue when I ran Nextcloud-AIO off of a Digital Ocean VPS. Not sure what they are doing differently, but that was running just as fast as bare metal.
I was running on unraid docker, so no VM and it was still awful ☹️
what does your name mean ? just curious :)
It’s all good. The name came out a random name generator a while back. I liked the name enough that I started using it generally for my fediverse presence. No meaning beyond that.
Oh nice. I like it !
Nextcloud has worked wonderfully for pretty much everything except for the office suite, which almost never works, I’ve heard AIO runs it fine. I’ve just had more useful luck with collabora on my phone and libreoffice on desktop that I’m not willing to fuss about to try and get it to work for the fifth time just for it to break again.
As for installation, I went the nextcloudpi route on a normal PC and haven’t really had any issues that weren’t my own fault. The biggest struggle I had was figuring out what packages I needed to install on a minimal Debian install before I could successfully run the installer.
I did spin up a nextcloudpi lxc container on proxmox since I’m expecting to containerize it in the future and it just started up perfectly along with the normal office suite issues.
I found the LearnLinuxTV tutorial on installing Nextcloud to be really good, and it’s been running great! It’s excellent if you want drive and has all the different other bits like notes, calendar, forms, office, etc.
However, you might also want to look at some other services too for specific tasks. I use Radicale for calendar, mostly because it was my first self-hosted service and I never bothered moving to the NC offering, but it’s very simple to setup and works well for me. Etherpad is good if you want shareable MD notes (but isn’t as great if you want private notes, for that local programs like Joplin, Marktext, and Markor are your best bet). For image hosting, Immich is always nice and has excellent mobile clients too (even on Linux mobile, you have the third-party Mimick!)
I’m very happy with Nextcloud so far. I run the AIO container on an old intel MacMini. I use files and photos. None of the other stuff.
Virtual files work ok on Linux desktop but you will lose the preview capability for non local files. Be careful with photos, it can preview and download them in a lower resolution than what you saved them as.
I use Jellyfin for my music but use nextcloud to upload and maintain the library. Huge pain in the beginning when I realized some folders with residual hidden files from a MacOS file system were being skipped and not shown in Nextcloud! Other than that, works great!
they don’t go out of their way to make the self hosted option easy
Just follow the docs https://docs.nextcloud.com/server/stable/admin_manual/installation/source_installation.html ? The manual install is a simple webserver + PHP-FPM + postgres setup
I have automated it with an ansible role [1], there’s nothing complicated about it, really.
