I don’t have to say that Google sucks. Some of there services are great, and trust me, I know. I’ve been a life long Google user for years and still to this day I at least use one or two Google services in my life. But the implications that come with your privacy and the right to your data and what you can do with it are limiting. For the last two years I’ve been working to move away from the Google eco-system and finding FOSS and self-hosted alternatives that rock!

One such alternative is Nextcloud! I’ve been using Nextcloud for about a year now and it’s now something I cannot live without. It helps me sync all of my important documents, keep track of my tasks, schedule my life with the calendar, and so much more!

In this article, I’m going to show you how I’ve created a simple Nextcloud server you can setup anywhere with the power of docker and docker-compose. There are many ways to install Nextcloud to a server or a computer, but I find that docker and docker-compose is the easiest as well the most flexible. especially with solutions such as Unraid and TrueNAS being available and supporting docker.

Before we get started, there’s a few things that you’ll need to setup before getting started. You’ll need to install docker and docker-compose. You’ll also need to create a dockerhub account and use the docker login command so you can pull images from dockerhub. Each machine’s setup for these is slightly different, but you can easily find tutorials online for installing and setting up docker.

With all that being said and with docker installed and setup, let’s get started creating our first Nextcloud server. Let’s start by creating a project folder and adding the files we’ll need:

mkdir -p my-nextcloud-server/docker/{mariadb,redis,nextcloud,nginx}
cd my-nextcloud-server
touch docker-compose.yml .env docker/{mariadb,redis,nextcloud,nginx}/Dockerfile

You should now have a project folder that looks like this:

.
├── docker
│   ├── mariadb
│   │   └── Dockerfile
│   ├── nextcloud
│   │   └── Dockerfile
│   ├── nginx
│   │   └── Dockerfile
│   └── redis
│       └── Dockerfile
├── docker-compose.yml
└── .env

Amazing! This will give us flexability to build out our own containers too! let’s start by adding our base images to all of our Dockerfiles:

docker/mariadb/Dockerfile

FROM mariadb/server:latest

docker/nextcloud/Dockerfile

FROM nextcloud:fpm-alpine

docker/nginx/Dockerfile

FROM nginx:alpine
RUN apk add wget
WORKDIR /etc/nginx/
RUN wget -O nginx.conf -L https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nextcloud/docker/master/.examples/docker-compose/insecure/mariadb/fpm/web/nginx.conf

docker/redis/Dockerfile

FROM redis:alpine

Now let’s setup a few enviorment variables for our docker-compose file to use:

.env

MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD = iamgroot
MYSQL_DATABASE = nextcloud
MYSQL_USER = nextcloud
MYSQL_PASSWORD = password

NEXTCLOUD_ADMIN_USER = jesse
NEXTCLOUD_ADMIN_PASSWORD = password

keep in mind, docker-secrets exist and should be used in a production enviorment. We wont cover those here but you can easily read up online on how to use them. Now with that in mind, let’s start on the main star of the show, the docker-compose file:

docker-compose.yml

version: '3'

volumes:
  nextcloud:
  mariadb:

services:
  mariadb:
    build: docker/mariadb
    container_name: mariadb
    restart: unless-stopped 
    volumes:
      - mariadb:/var/lib/mysql
    environment:
      MYSQL_DATABASE: ${MYSQL_DATABASE} 
      MYSQL_USER: ${MYSQL_USER}
      MYSQL_PASSWORD: ${MYSQL_PASSWORD}
      MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD: ${MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD} 
    command: --transaction-isolation=READ-COMMITTED --binlog-format=ROW

  redis:
    build: docker/redis
    container_name: redis
    restart: unless-stopped 

  app:
    build: docker/nextcloud
    container_name: app
    restart: unless-stopped 
    depends_on:
      - mariadb
      - redis
    volumes:
      - nextcloud:/var/www/html
    environment:
      REDIS_HOST: redis
      MYSQL_HOST: db
      MYSQL_DATABASE: ${MYSQL_DATABASE} 
      MYSQL_USER: ${MYSQL_USER}
      MYSQL_PASSWORD: ${MYSQL_PASSWORD}
      NEXTCLOUD_ADMIN_USER: ${NEXTCLOUD_ADMIN_USER}
      NEXTCLOUD_ADMIN_PASSWORD: ${NEXTCLOUD_ADMIN_PASSWORD}

  web:
    build: docker/nginx
    container_name: web
    restart: unless-stopped 
    ports:
      - 8080:80
    depends_on:
      - app
    volumes:
      - nextcloud:/var/www/html:ro

  cron:
    build: docker/nextcloud
    container_name: cron
    restart: unless-stopped 
    volumes:
      - nextcloud:/var/www/html
    entrypoint: /cron.sh
    depends_on:
      - mariadb
      - redis

you should now be able to start up the nextcloud server using the docker-compose command:

docker-compose up

keep in mind, this is meant to be put behind a reverse-proxy of some sort but is a great starting point for getting started. You can read more about the Nextcloud image here and for other examples for a more secure connection here.

Stay tuned for more content about nextcloud and google alternatives!