Installation requirements

Installation requirements

You have decided to set up Nextcloud snap as a safe home for your data, that's great!

Nextcloud snap is designed to be easy to install and simple to maintain. The ideal Nextcloud snap is an "install and forget" Nextcloud service that works on most architectures and updates itself without needing administrative skills. Combining Nextcloud with snapd makes it a perfect fit for IoT or scalable environments. Snapd is a secure and robust technology which the Nextcloud snap team has embraced.

Before getting started be aware of what you expect from your Nextcloud instance and what system requirements have to be met to fulfil your needs. There are various aspects you might consider;

• number of users
• storage & space requirements
• power consuption & efficiency
• network & connectivity
• backup & redundancy
• etc. ...

Plan your setup. Do some research, read the docs and the Wiki.

Hardware

Whether you plan to run Nextcloud snap on a bare metal server, a virtual server, a virtual machine, in a container or on a desktop PC, a notebook PC, a mini PC or on a single board computer like Raspberry Pi, you'll be up and running in no time.

The folks at Ubuntu have made it really easy to install Ubuntu on almost any hardware out there.

Operating system

Since snaps are Ubuntu-centric, its no surprise that Nextcloud snap was designed to run on Ubuntu and the reason why Ubuntu is the only supported distribution for Nextcloud snap.

• Ubuntu Server for most hardware
• Ubuntu IoT for Raspberry Pi

Network

Assuming a network where the host running Nextcloud snap acquires a static local IPv4 address from DHCP/router and the required ports 80 and 443 are enabled and internet facing, the public IPv4 address must be available via DNS (Domain Name System) request.

• static local IPv4 from DHCP/router
• enabled Ports 80 and 443
• DNS entry pointing to public IPv4 address

Domain name and DNS

While some folks own a TLD (Top Level Domain) and will probably create a subdomain pointing to the host like cloud.mydomain.com. Other folks may require a DNS provider or DDNS provider for a domain name like cloud.mydomain.mydnsprovider.xyz pointing to their public IPv4 address. That will be the address you enter into the browser to reach the Nextcloud instance.

There are plenty DNS providers out there to choose from. Some come at a fee, some are free. Often you will have a choice of domain names, sometimes you have to take what is available. Do some research and make the right choice for you.

A DNS entry pointing to the public IPv4 address is a requirement for an SSL Certificate for HTTPS encryption.

Continue with installation