Nextcloud

Nextcloud is a self-hosted web groupware and cloud software, offering collaboration on files, managing calendar events, contacts and tasks.

Installation

A minimal example to get a Nextcloud running on localhost should look like this

/etc/nixos/configuration.nix

services.nextcloud = {                
  enable = true;                   
  package = pkgs.nextcloud25;
  hostName = "localhost";
  config.adminpassFile = "${pkgs.writeText "adminpass" "test123"}";
};

After that you will be able to login into your Nextcloud instance at http://localhost with user root and password test123 as configured above.

Configuration

Be sure to read the Nextcloud module's documentation in the NixOS Manual.

Enable apps

Note: Parts of this instruction and module are not yet stable and will be available in the upcoming NixOS 22.11 release.

Some apps which are already packaged on NixOS can be installed directly with the following example configuration

/etc/nixos/configuration.nix

services.nextcloud = {                
  enable = true;                   
  [...]
  package = pkgs.nextcloud25;
  extraApps = with pkgs.nextcloud25Packages.apps; {
    inherit mail news contacts;
  };
  extraAppsEnable = true;
};

The apps mail, news and contacts will be installed and enabled in your instance automatically. Note that the Nextcloud version specified in package and extraApps need to match on of the stable Nextcloud versions available in the NixOS repository.

To manually fetch and install packages, you need to add them via the helper script fetchNextcloudApp by specifing the release tarball as url and the correct checksum. Both are available for example in the official Nextcloud app store. Note that in this case the app package version and checksum has to be updated manually in case there is a new release.

/etc/nixos/configuration.nix

services.nextcloud = {                
  enable = true;                   
  [...]
  extraApps = {
    mail = pkgs.fetchNextcloudApp rec {
      url = "https://github.com/nextcloud-releases/mail/releases/download/v1.14.1/mail-v1.14.1.tar.gz";
      sha256 = "sha256-sQUsYC3cco6fj9pF2l1NrCEhA3KJoOvJRhXvBlVpNqo=";
    };
    contacts = pkgs.fetchNextcloudApp rec {
      url = "https://github.com/nextcloud-releases/contacts/releases/download/v4.2.2/contacts-v4.2.2.tar.gz";
      sha256 = "sha256-eTc51pkg3OdHJB7X4/hD39Ce+9vKzw1nlJ7BhPOzdy0=";
    };
  };
  extraAppsEnable = true;
};

Alternatively apps can be manually installed via the app store integrated in your Nextcloud instance by navigating in the profile menu to the site "Apps".

Maintenance

Upgrade

As you can see on the package search, there is no default nextcloud package. Instead you have to set the current version in services.nextcloud.package. As soon a major version of Nextcloud gets unsupported, it will be removed from nixpkgs as well.

Upgrading then consists of these steps:

1. nextcloud-occ maintenance:mode --on
2. Increment the version of services.nextcloud.package in your config by 1 (leaving out a major version is not supported)
3. nixos-rebuild switch
4. nextcloud-occ maintenance:mode --off

In theory, your nextcloud has now been upgraded by one version. NixOS attempts nextcloud-occ upgrade, if this succeeds without problems you don't need to do anything. Check journalctl to make sure nothing horrible happened. Go to the /settings/admin/overview page in your nextcloud to see whether it recommends further processing, such as database reindexing or conversion.

Clients

Nextcloudcmd

nextcloudcmd is a terminal client performing only a single sync run and then exits. Following example command will synchronize the local folder /home/myuser/music with the remote folder /music of the Nextcloud server https://nextcloud.example.org.

# nix shell nixpkgs#nextcloud-client -h --user example --password test123 --path /music /home/myuser/music https://nextcloud.example.org

The argument -h will enable syncing hidden files. For demonstration purpose username and password are supplied as an argument. This is a security risk and shouldn't be used in production.

Using Home Manager we can create a systemd-timer which automatically runs the sync command every hour for the user myuser.

/etc/nixos/configuration.nix

home-manager.users.myuser = {
  
  home.file.".netrc".text = ''default
    login example
    password test123
  '';

  systemd.user = {
    services.nextcloud-autosync = {
      Unit = {
        Description = "Auto sync Nextcloud";
        After = "network-online.target"; 
      };
      Service = {
        Type = "simple";
        ExecStart= "${pkgs.nextcloud-client}/bin/nextcloudcmd -h -n --path /music /home/myuser/music https://nextcloud.example.org"; 
        TimeoutStopSec = "180";
        KillMode = "process";
        KillSignal = "SIGINT";
      };
      Install.WantedBy = ["multi-user.target"];
    };
    timers.nextcloud-autosync = {
      Unit.Description = "Automatic sync files with Nextcloud when booted up after 5 minutes then rerun every 60 minutes";
      Timer.OnUnitActiveSec = "60min";
      Install.WantedBy = ["multi-user.target" "timers.target"];
    };
    startServices = true;
  };

};

The login credentials will be written to a file called .netrc used nextcloudcmd for authentication to the Nextcloud server.

Tips and tricks

Change default listening port

In case port 80 is already used by a different application or you're using a different web server than Nginx, which is used by the Nextcloud module, you can change the listening port with the following option:

/etc/nixos/configuration.nix

services.nginx.virtualHosts."localhost".listen = [ { addr = "127.0.0.1"; port = 8080; } ];

Troubleshooting

Reading php logs

The default Nextcloud setting is to log to syslog. To read php logs simply run

# journalctl -t php

Nextcloud-setup error: Nextcloud is not installed

You get the message

 U Wed Jul  3 06:15:06 2019 p3 nextcloud-cron.service Nextcloud[9374]: {cron} {"Exception":"Exception","Message":"Not installed","Code":0,"Trace":[{"file":"\/nix\/store\/9c58nxa9mzzg93ppwq2jlynpf4vsbd30-nextcloud-15.0.8\/lib\/base.php","line":660,"function":"checkInstalled","class":"OC","type":"::","args":[]},{"file":"\/nix\/store\/9c58nxa9mzzg93ppwq2jlynpf4vsbd30-nextcloud-15.0.8\/lib\/base.php","line":1068,"function":"init","class":"OC","type":"::","args":[]},{"file":"\/nix\/store\/9c58nxa9mzzg93ppwq2jlynpf4vsbd30-nextcloud-15.0.8\/cron.php","line":41,"args":["\/nix\/store\/9c58nxa9mzzg93ppwq2jlynpf4vsbd30-nextcloud-15.0.8\/lib\/base.php"],"function":"require_once"}],"File":"\/nix\/store\/9c58nxa9mzzg93ppwq2jlynpf4vsbd30-nextcloud-15.0.8\/lib\/base.php","Line":277,"CustomMessage":"--"}

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