Hi selfhosted! Hope you’re having a good day :)
I’m pretty new to self-hosting and have been traipsing through a minefield attempting to make NextCloud AIO work inside Docker. The instance runs for a few days/weeks and then starts getting extremely slow on the website, then dies entirely. Usually, either the ClamAV or Apache containers get stuck in an unhealthy state that no number of reboots or reinstalls can fix.
Quick context for how this all works. I have one machine that runs Proxmox and a group of VMs for various purposes. One such VM runs my Nextcloud. This VM is running Ubuntu 23.10, Docker, and the NextCloud AIO package.
Another VM hosts OpenMediaVault, which contains a set of SMB Shares mounted to the host VM that act as storage for NextCloud. The symlinks (I think I’m using that word right) on the host VM have user and group permissions updated according to AIO’s documentation. Proxmox is configured to boot this VM first, then boot the rest in sequence once the files are available.
Right now I’ve got Nextcloud handling Synchronization of Files, Calendars, Contacts, and Kanban boards via the Deck Extension. Everything else can be abandoned at this point, these are the only functions I’m truly using. If this gives you an idea for an alternative app I’d love to hear it.
So after AIO broke for about the 5th time in the 8 months since I started trying to self-host it, I’ve been looking at alternatives. Before I go that route, I want to try installing Nextcloud without Docker. Some of the posts I’ve read here suggest that the Docker distribution of NextCloud has serious issues with stability and safely installing updates.
I plan to make a new VM entirely for this, Distro undecided. I still want to run it as a VM and still use my SMB shares for bulk storage.
So where would I begin if I planned to install NextCloud directly to the VM rather than through Docker?
Might look into running NextCloud on NixOS. Haven’t tried it myself yet but noticed NextCloud referenced in NixOS’s documentation pretty heavily. If I remember correctly it was as simple as
service.nextcloud.enable = true;
in the configuration.nix file to get it started.
Linux unplugged had an episode on it recently and said they were surprised how performative it was. Sounded like they were going to be moving their instance over to it.
There’s a little more to it, but that’s how i run it, and my experience has been considerably better, than with the docker AIO. That being said, i’m worried about the potential security implications of this running on my home network. I don’t know enough of this yet to make an educated statement
I’m just guessing myself, but I suspect it’s probably ok-ish. NextCloud is probably better security wise than most things I self host.
Follow security best practices and things should be fine.
- Don’t expose to the public net anything that doesn’t need to be.
- Keep it updated.
- Make sure it can’t see anything it doesn’t need to on your home network.
- Use strong passwords and don’t reuse them.
- Keep backups (RAID is not a backup!)
Gonna be reading into Nixos, this may be the way forward I’m looking for. Thank you both for your responses!
Join the Matrix support channel if have any problems getting started! The documentation can be very scattered and NixOS throws a lot of new concepts at you :P
in theory it should be somewhat more responsive because there’s no sandboxing or containerization going on, nix operates with tools that are much more straightforward
