iiab/roles/nextcloud

Nextcloud README

Students and teachers can store their documents, calendars, contacts and photos locally within Nextcloud, which is much like having a (local) version of Dropbox or Google Drive on your very own Internet-in-a-Box.

This Ansible playbook was derived from an earlier ownCloud playbook thanks to Josh Dennis in 2016/2017.

What's Included

The Nextcloud suite is divided into three main categories:

• Nextcloud Files – Enterprise File Sync and Share
• Nextcloud Talk – Calls, chat and web meetings
• Nextcloud Groupware – Calendar, Contacts & Mail

Install It

(1) Set these 2 variable in /etc/iiab/local_vars.yml prior to installing Internet-in-a-Box:

nextcloud_install: True
nextcloud_enabled: True

(2) If you want to access Nextcloud from IPv4 addresses across the public Internet, then also set:

nextcloud_allow_public_ips: True

To further refine Nextcloud access controls based on IPv4 addresses, you can edit /etc/apache2/sites-available/nextcloud.conf after it's created by this template: /opt/iiab/iiab/roles/nextcloud/templates/nextcloud.conf.j2

(3) Strongly consider also setting nginx_high_php_limits: True in your /etc/iiab/local_vars.yml, to allocate important RAM/resources to PHP. Of course, enabling this might cause excess use of RAM/disk or other resources if not calibrated to your hardware and network! So after install is complete, verify and evaluate these 6 settings in /etc/php/[ACTUAL PHP VERSION]/fpm/php.ini:

• upload_max_filesize
• post_max_size
• memory_limit (Nextcloud recommends 512+ MB)
• max_execution_time
• max_input_time
• max_input_vars (Moodle 3.11+ requires 5000+ with PHP 8+)

Useful PHP recommendations for these settings (while largely tailored to WordPress, and aimed at very low-end hardware) can be found here: /opt/iiab/iiab/roles/www_options/tasks/main.yml#L53-L133

(4) If you're running Nextcloud 22+ in production, carefully check that Nextcloud's latest formal prereqs (required AND recommended) are included per your community's needs. In places like these:

• https://docs.nextcloud.com/server/22/admin_manual/installation/source_installation.html#prerequisites-for-manual-installation
• https://github.com/iiab/iiab/blob/master/roles/nextcloud/tasks/install.yml

Using It

Log in to Nextcloud at http://box/nextcloud, http://box.lan/nextcloud, http://172.18.96.1/nextcloud (or similar) using:

Username: Admin
Password: changeme

Known Issues

Do not install the Nextcloud News app (an RSS/Atom Feed reader) if your OS is 32-bits: #3069

Future Directions

Going forward, should Internet-in-a-Box consider integrating optimizations (or more!) from these below?

• https://ownyourbits.com/nextcloudpi/
• https://ownyourbits.com/2017/02/13/nextcloud-ready-raspberry-pi-image/
• https://github.com/nextcloud/nextcloudpi

Please contact us if you can help!