How to Install Nextcloud on Debian 10

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Introduction

Nextcloud is a suite of file hosting software that began as a free, open-source, fork of ownCloud. It provides functions similar to Dropbox or Google Drive. This guide describes how to install Nextcloud on a newly-installed Debian server instance at Vultr.

Prerequisites

Update the system by following the best practices guide for Debian.

1. Install and Configure MariaDB

Install MariaDB.

# apt install mariadb-server php-mysql -y

Run the database security wizard.

# mysql_secure_installation

Answer the questions as follows. Replace the example password with a strong password.

Enter current password for root (enter for none): Enter
Set root password? [Y/n]: Y
New password: example-password
Re-enter new password: example-password
Remove anonymous users? [Y/n]: Y
Disallow root login remotely? [Y/n]: Y
Remove test database and access to it? [Y/n]: Y
Reload privilege tables now? [Y/n]: Y

# mysql -u root -p

Create a database for Nextcloud.

MariaDB> CREATE DATABASE nextclouddb;

Create a Nextcloud user and grant local access. Replace example-password with a stong password.

MariaDB> GRANT ALL ON nextclouddb.* TO 'nextcloud_user'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'example-password';
MariaDB> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
MariaDB> EXIT;

2. Install PHP

Install PHP and the necessary extensions.

# apt install php php-gd php-mbstring php-dom php-curl php-zip php-simplexml php-xml -y

3. Install Apache

Install Apache and the PHP module.

# apt install apache2 libapache2-mod-php -y

Start Apache and enable it to run at boot.

# systemctl start apache2
# systemctl enable apache2

4. Install Nextcloud

Locate the download URL for the most recent *.tar.bz2 distribution of Nextcloud from this page. Download the *.tar.bz2 file with wget.

# wget https://download.nextcloud.com/server/releases/nextcloud-<VERSION_NUMBER>.tar.bz2

Unpack the distribution to the /var/www/html directory.

# tar -xjf nextcloud-18.0.4.tar.bz2 -C /var/www/html

Make Apache the owner of the Nextcloud files.

# chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/html/nextcloud
# chmod -R 755 /var/www/html/nextcloud

5. Nextcloud Configuration

Navigate to the Nextcloud URL at your server's IP address.

http://192.0.2.123/nextcloud/

Enter the configuration information.

Choose an admin username and secure password.
Leave Data folder at the default value.
For Database user, enter: nextcloud_user
For Database password, enter the nextcloud_user password you chose in MariaDB.
For Database name, enter: nextclouddb
Leave "localhost" as "localhost".

Click Finish.

Conclusion

You have completed the basic Nextcloud setup on Debian 10. To install additional modules and themes, see the official documentation.

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