Nextcloud on the Raspberry Pi

This is a little private project where I install a Nextcloud instance on a Raspberry Pi with the help of Ansible and Docker. The data is stored on a USB drive. In my case it's a 128 GB USB-stick.

Ansible has the advantage to make the installation process repeatable but it has to be installed and understood.

This installation is dockerized partly because it is cool and partly because it doesn't flood the OS with dozens of installed packages. Also it this makes it easy to have different versions of for example mariadb to be used. Also you can just move your data to a different system, deploy the containers and you are up and running again easily for example after a hardware failure. In theory dockerized software makes it easy to upgrade but the build in upgrader of Nextcloud works fine for me.

To understand this project it helps to be familiar with bash and Linux in general, the Pi, Docker and Docker Compose.

Considerations

The setup is as follows: You have your normal PC/Laptop/Whatever which runs Ansible and installs the software to your Raspberry Pi.

Of course you can skip this and just use the docker files given that you installed docker and docker-compose manually on your Pi. But if you start with a naked Pi, Ansible comes in handy.

First: Install Ansible on the control machine

i do this on my WSL Ubuntu on Windows via:

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:ansible/ansible
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install ansible

This raises a problem because I can't change the permissions of my path. See also.

Therefore I use an ugly workaround. I add the following line to nano ~/.bashrc:

export ANSIBLE_CONFIG="/mnt/e/path/to/nextcloud_on_pi/Ansible"

After that you must restart your WSL-Session.

In Fedora you can just click Ansible in your software store.

Second: Setup your Pi

In the sudo raspi-config setup:

• your keyboard layout
• a password for your user or the default pi user.
• a hostname
• wifi connection (if needed)
• wait for network at boot
• ssh access in the interface options
• set a password for the root user. It'll help in case the mount of your storage fails.

On the CLI do

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

For convenience use an private key without passphrase. First type ssh-keygen and and hit ENTER until you are done. That will create a public-private-key pair with the default file names and without a passphrase. To copy the public key to the Pi type:

ssh-copy-id pi@<hostname>

Prepare the USB drive

Source 1: netzmafia

Source 2: jankarres

Find device name, UUID and LABEL of stick.

sudo blkid -o list -w /dev/null

Format the USB drive with ext4 and give it a label ("USBSTICK" in my case) to address it later.

sudo mkfs.ext4 -L USBSTICK  /dev/sda1  #<-- sda1 replace with real device name

Your Domain

For me the easiest and cheapest way to get to a domain was to use a DynDNS Provider like duckdns.org or at dynv6.com. I use dynv6 because I like IPv6 ;-) and they have a nice user experience. I cannot say anything about their trustworthiness.

dynv6.com has a great script to update the DNS entry and a normal login.

You can of course use your own domain. But I have no experience for that.

The Ansible script

There are 2 roles. One is for basic setup and installing needed software like docker or docker-compose. The other role focuses only on nextcloud stuff, like creating directories or copying docker files.

But that's only for your understanding. If you only want to use it you must set the vars in Ansible/playbook.yml for credentials and passwords and stuff. There you can set the installation URL for docker-compose. I put in the version 1.25.4. You can find the current URL at docs.docker.com under "Install as a container".

You also must set your hostname in the file Ansible/hosts. In my case it is raspi4.

execute the Ansible script

To run the Ansible execute

ansible-playbook -K playbook.yml

your directory where your playbook.yml is located.

Start the containers

One challenge are the docker images. Although we are dealing with very popular software not all container images are available for ARM. That's why I had a look at alternative container images. I found them on hub.docker.com

Finally you can execute:

cd /media/nextcloud/
docker-compose build
docker-compose up -d

Now you should be able to access you Nextcloud at your domain. Or probably you have to wait for your letsencrypt certificate or that the cronjob writes your IP-address to the DNS-Server. If you create your admin account and get a 504 error, don't worry just wait for the Nextcloud to be setup for you and reload the page a few minutes later.

Setup your internet router

It is very important to setup the router correctly. I use a Fritzbox 7560. I setup Internet --> Freigaben --> Gerät für Freigaben hinzufügen --> [choose the device] Neue Freigabe --> HTTPS and HTTP (vor Lets Encrypt) only IPv6.

Then the Nextcloud is available if you have IPv6 internet. If not I have to use a vpn. If the vpn is connected, I access the Nextcloud by routing the domain "hard" to the internal IPv4 address. That can be done in the host file of the device or in the host file of the pi-hole if you use one. I just added the line

192.168.178.46  mydomain.net

to the file /etc/pihole/lan.list

Setup VPN in the Fritzbox

Backup

You should definitively implement a backup. Especially if you store your data on a usbstick as I do.

I implemented a backup by mirroring all Nextcloud data from the usbstick to a ftp directory on the 1 TB harddrive attachted to the Fritzbox. As an inspiration you can look at the file backup.sh.j2. It uses the lftp command. Especially turning on and off the maintenance mode is worth noting:

docker exec -u www-data -it nextcloud_container php occ maintenance:mode --on

Update

You can use the Auto Updater.

I only do the updates from time to time in the Browser.

But you can also do them via docker:

docker-compose build --pull
docker-compose up -d

Learning material I used

Ansible beginners tutorial

SSL Front-End Proxy With Automatic Free Certificate Management

Docker Containers, Plex, Nextcloud, & Let's Encrypt = Awesome Server Setup

letsencrypt how it works

Must read about Nextcloud

Here you can choose which kind of Nextcloud you want to setup

NGINX Readings:

ONE

TWO

crontab einrichten, für automatische updates