View this tutorial on LinkedIn.
- You're in complete control of your data (it's literally on a box right in front of you)
- You can access your files from anywhere with an internet connection
- It's super easy to scale as your data grows
- You have the option to add more hard drives and have backups of your backups (i.e. RAID)
- You can unplug and take your data with you anywhere (i.e. if you're offline and need your data)
- Moving files & folders is as easy as moving data from one Finder window to another
- The price is unbeatable. You will only have to pay for your RPi and HD, all the software we use is FREE (~$140 CAD for my entire setup (1TB of cloud storage), but you can make yours for <$100).
This tutorial was created on March 1st, 2020. I will not be updating it much in the future, however, unless there are major changes made to OpenMediaVault or NextCloud, it should still be applicable for years to come.
Also, a big shoutout to PcMac and Wagner's TechTalk, whose videos and documentation taught me how to do this. If you learn better through YouTube videos, check out their YouTube pages here (PcMac) and here (WTT).
If you're ready to build your own personal cloud-based storage solution, let's get started!
- Mac computer (this is an Apple tutorial)
- Raspberry Pi 4 with Raspbian
- Micro SD card (ideally >4GB and FAST)
- >=2.5" Empty external hard drive (this is your actual storage, so ideally USB 3.0, >500GB and formatted as ExFAT)
- Keyboard and mouse (to connect to RPi, optional for SSH setup)
- Mini HDMI (to connect to monitor)
- OpenMediaVault 5 (usul, downloaded later)
- NextCloud V18.0.1 (downloaded later)
- PHP V7.3.14 (downloaded later)
I will be controlling my RPi from my Mac through SSH. If you are trying to SSH to a headless RPi, you can find out how to do so here.
On your RPi, go to Menu > Preferences > Raspberry Pi Configuration. Go to the Interfaces panel and make sure SSH is Enabled.
On your RPi, open a terminal window and enter the following command:
hostname -I
which will return your RPi IP address. For example,
192.168.0.41
copy this value down somewhere.
Open a terminal window on your Mac computer and enter the following command:
ssh pi@192.168.0.41
Replace the 192.168.0.41 with your own IP address you got in the previous step.
If this is the first time you're connecting to your RPi over SSH, Terminal will ask you if you want to continue. Enter yes and press RETURN. At this point, you'll be asked to enter the RPi password.
You have now connected to your RPi through SSH and have full control of it over the command line.
NOTE: from here on when I refer to the Terminal, I mean the Terminal on your Mac that is connected to your RPi over SSH.
In the Terminal, enter each of the following commands (each command is the entire code block, ranging from 1 to several lines) and press enter each time. This should go without saying, but make sure to wait until the previous command process is done before entering the next one.
sudo su
cat <<EOF >> /etc/apt/sources.list.d/openmediavault.list
deb https://packages.openmediavault.org/public usul main
# deb https://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/openmediavault/packages usul main
## Uncomment the following line to add software from the proposed repository.
# deb https://packages.openmediavault.org/public usul-proposed main
# deb https://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/openmediavault/packages usul-proposed main
## This software is not part of OpenMediaVault, but is offered by third-party
## developers as a service to OpenMediaVault users.
# deb https://packages.openmediavault.org/public usul partner
# deb https://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/openmediavault/packages usul partner
EOF
export LANG=C.UTF-8
export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
wget -O "/etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/openmediavault-archive-keyring.asc" https://packages.openmediavault.org/public/archive.key
apt-key add "/etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/openmediavault-archive-keyring.asc"
apt-get update
apt-get --yes --auto-remove --show-upgraded \
--allow-downgrades --allow-change-held-packages \
--no-install-recommends \
--option Dpkg::Options::="--force-confdef" \
--option DPkg::Options::="--force-confold" \
install openmediavault-keyring openmediavault
omv-confdbadm populate
cat /etc/issue
OMV should now be ready to go on your RPi. You can access OMV on your Mac by opening up a web browser and entering the IP address obtained previously as the URL.
If after installing OMV you can no longer log into your RPi via SSH (permission denied (public key, password)) it is because the pi user is not included in the ssh group on OMV. To fix this, go to the OMV GUI, navigate to the Group tab, select the pi group from the table and click Edit. Add the pi user to the pi group, then select OK. Navigate to the User tab, select the newly created pi user and click Edit. Under the Groups tab, scroll down and make sure SSH is enabled (checked). Save and apply settings and you should be able to SSH to your RPi again.
Now that OMV is up and running, we've officially made an RPi NAS Server. The rest of this tutorial uses NextCloud to make our NAS Server cloud-based (i.e. accessible from anywhere).
Navigate to OMV by going to <IP> and enter your login information. Unless you have changed it, the username is admin and password is openmediavault by default.
Change the port to 90 (default is 80). You will immediately get an error because OMV is now only available on port 90 and you need to specify this in the URL (<IP>:90). We do this because Apache web server defaults to port 80 (explained later on) and it's just easier this way.
Before continuing, make sure to apt-update and apt-upgrade.
Here's where we install our web server, database server, and the PHP modules needed for NC to run. Enter these commands into your Terminal:
sudo apt-get install apache2 mariadb-server libapache2-mod-php
sudo apt-get install php7.3-gd php7.3-json php7.3-mysql php7.3-curl php7.3-mbstring
sudo apt-get install php7.3-intl php-imagick php7.3-xml php7.3-zip
Finally, restart the web server
sudo service apache2 restart
Go to the OMV GUI port 80 (default) and the default Apache web page should show up. This is good.
Time to add NC! First, navigate to the html directory with the following command in Terminal:
cd /var/www/html
Then run the following Curl script to download NC 18:
curl https://download.nextcloud.com/server/releases/nextcloud-18.0.1.tar.bz2 | sudo tar -jxv
Now we create a folder where NC can save information.
sudo mkdir -p /var/www/html/nextcloud/data
Next, we need to configure permissions of our newly created folder so we can access NC on our webserver.
sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/html/nextcloud/
sudo chmod 750 /var/www/html/nextcloud/data
Now that we're done, restart the Apache web server and reboot your RPi.
sudo service apache2 restart
sudo reboot
Give your RPi a chance to reboot, then login via SSH again. Run apt-update and apt-upgrade to make sure everything is updated.
Go to the <ip> URL and you should see the Apache default page running. Suffix the URL with /nextcloud/ (Ex. 192.168.1.41/nextcloud) and you should see the NC login page.
In order to configure NC, we need to configure the MySQL database. Back to the Terminal we go. Change all of the code in [brackets] to your own text.
sudo mysql
CREATE DATABASE [db name] CHARACTER SET utf8mb4 COLLATE utf8mb4_general_ci;
GRANT ALL ON [db name].* TO '[db username]'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY '[strong password]';
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
EXIT;
After doing that, you can finally login to NC. Back on the <ip>/nextcloud page, fill out the db information form with the [db name], [db username], and [db password] text you just entered. Create an admin username and password and hit Login.
We need to forward Port 80 and Port 443 (for Dynamic DNS, explained later on) to the RPi IP address.
To set up port forwarding, you'll need to access your router admin. Type the router's IP address into your browser. If you don't know the IP address, use the following command to find it:
netstat -nr | grep default
It will be listed beside the default keyword and will probably look something like 192.168.1.1. Just make sure that you create two port forwarding records that point to your RPi IP address (also the IP of OMV and NC). The internal-external ports should look like this:
-
- Internal port 80-80
-
- External port 80-80
-
- Internal port 443-443
-
- External port 443-443
To set up dynamic DNS, we will use Duck DNS. It's free and straightforward to use. At this point, make sure that Port Forwarding is set up for Port 443 or this isn't going to work.
Log in to Duck DNS using one of the provided methods, then add a domain of your choice, for example mycloud.duckdns.com.
NOTE: You might not be able to access your mycloud.duckdns.org domain on your wifi network. For testing, use your phone's cellular data. You should see the apache default page if everything is working correctly.
In order to access your NC, we need to trust the mycloud.duckdns.org domain in the config.php file.
Back to the terminal. Navigate to /var/www/html/nextcloud/config using the following command:
cd /var/www/html/nextcloud/config
If you ls from here, you should see a file named config.php (NOT config.sample.php), which is the file we need to edit. config.php has heavy permissions so you will need to sudo in order to read & write. Use the following command:
sudo nano config.php
The contents of the file should look something like this:
<?php
$CONFIG = array (
'instanceid' => 'xxx',
'passwordsalt' => 'xxx',
'secret' => 'xxx',
'trusted_domains' =>
array (
0 => '192.168.x.x',
),
'datadirectory' => 'xxx',
'dbtype' => 'xxx',
'version' => 'xxx',
'overwrite.cli.url' => 'xxx',
'dbname' => 'xxx',
'dbhost' => 'xxx',
'dbport' => '',
'dbtableprefix' => 'oc_',
'mysql.utf8mb4' => true,
'dbuser' => 'xxx',
'dbpassword' => 'xxx',
'installed' => true,
);
We need to edit the trusted_domains property and add our mycloud.duckdns.org domain name. After doing so, the file should look like this:
<?php
$CONFIG = array (
'instanceid' => 'xxx',
'passwordsalt' => 'xxx',
'secret' => 'xxx',
'trusted_domains' =>
array (
0 => '192.168.x.x',
1 => 'mycloud.duckdns.org',
),
'datadirectory' => 'xxx',
'dbtype' => 'xxx',
'version' => 'xxx',
'overwrite.cli.url' => 'xxx',
'dbname' => 'xxx',
'dbhost' => 'xxx',
'dbport' => '',
'dbtableprefix' => 'oc_',
'mysql.utf8mb4' => true,
'dbuser' => 'xxx',
'dbpassword' => 'xxx',
'installed' => true,
);
Make sure to save the file. Once that is done, you'll be able to access your NC via any network using the .duckdns.org domain name. Give it a try on your phone to confirm that it works (use cellular data).
Ah, the final step.
On the OMV dashboard, navigate to File Systems. From here, find your connected HD and click the Mount button.
Now, on the NC dashboard, click the icon at the top-right of your screen and select Apps from the dropdown menu. Scroll down to the External Storage Support row and enable it.
Back in our Terminal, we need to set permissions on our newly mounted HD. First, we need the mount point path. We can find this by going into the /srv/ directory and typing ls to view the folder contents. You should see something like dev-disk-by-label-XXX. The mount point path is, therefore, /srv/dev-disk-by-label-XXX.
Now that we have this, enter the following commands to configure a couple permissions:
sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /srv/dev-disk-by-label-XXX
sudo chmod -R 0750 /srv/dev-disk-by-label-XXX
Back in the NC dashboard, click the top-right icon again and then go to Settings. Add a folder name of your choice, set the External Storage to Local and paste in the /srv/dev-disk-by-label-XXX location under Configuration. Save it. If you navigate back to the External Storages tab, you should see your newly added HD and its data.
In the OMV dashboard, under Shared Folders, add a shared folder with the mounter HD as the Device. Then, under SMB/CIFS, make sure it is enabled (under General Settings) and click on the Shares tab. Add a share using the folder we just created and configure it as you like.
Let's make sure everything is working and we can move files from our Mac to our External Hard Drive.
Open up a Finder window on your Mac and press Command+K. In the text field, enter the following:
smb://<IP of your RPi>
Connect to it and enter your login information. Once it's all set up, try to drag & drop some files into the folder. Wait for them to copy and Wall-Ah! Your files are safe & sound on your HD and can be accessed through NextCloud.
Congratulations! You just created your own personal cloud storage server and you can now put files directly onto your external hard drive from anywhere in the world. It's not the most performant solution in the world but hey, you're in complete control of your data now. Give yourself a pat on the back, you deserve it.
The final product. This is what 1TB of cloud storage looks like.
