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Nextcloud for Mere Mortals

Somewhere in your house there is a laptop holding the only copy of the family's documents, and a phone holding the only copy of its photos, and a club secretary's inbox holding the only copy of the minutes. Nextcloud is the open-source answer to that quiet emergency: the file sync, sharing, calendars, and contacts of a commercial cloud, running on a computer in your own house, with the files as ordinary files on your own disk. This guide explains how it works, installs it by hand so every part has a name, proves the doors its clients use, and ends where it must: the backup that is two jobs, not one.

The lab behind this guide ran the real thing: Nextcloud 35.0.2, the project's current release on build day, its download checked against the project's own checksum. It was installed with occ onto PHP and MariaDB, served by PHP's built-in web server because the build machine has no Apache — a declared deviation whose two visible effects chapter 3 names — and exercised the way its clients exercise it: a real web login, WebDAV uploads and downloads that came back byte-identical, a second account made from the command line, a share and a public link through the sharing API, a calendar event in and out over CalDAV, and a file's old version and its stay in the trash, both inspected on disk. Midway, the build machine rebooted and lost its system disk and the lab's database with it, while the data folder survived untouched; the entire proof suite was then re-run on the rebuilt server, and criteria.md keeps the ledger of what was run and what was only read.

What this guide covers

  • What Nextcloud is — the mental model: sync first, files as ordinary files, one account per person; what it is not (a backup, an office suite, end-to-end encrypted)
  • The moving parts — web server and PHP, the database, the data folder, the clockwork, and the apps: what each holds, and what breaks when each stops
  • Installing on a server — the four doors, then the manual one in full: checksum, database, occ, trusted domains, and the lab's built-in-server deviation, told plainly
  • First login and settings — the login with its curtain open (cookies, request token, the Origin header that bit the lab), skeleton files, and the setup checks read as a to-do list
  • Files every day — daily life in the Files app, files as files on disk, versions and the trashbin as the two safety nets
  • WebDAV, the door everything uses — the protocol proven with curl and a hash; app passwords; what the desktop and phone clients are, honestly labelled
  • Calendar, contacts, and the everyday apps — CalDAV proven in the core, CardDAV beside it, and the app store's furniture under three rules
  • Sharing with people and links — grants to named people through the OCS API, and public links fetched as a stranger — with the standing rules for keys shaped like addresses
  • Users, groups, and admin — making accounts both ways (one of them hangs scripts), groups, quotas, and freezing instead of deleting
  • The occ toolkit — the side door: status, integrity, setup checks, maintenance mode, files:scan, and the command that doesn't exist
  • Backing up — the database and the folder, in order, from the same frozen moment — and the lab's reboot as the parable that proves the point
  • Recipes — the standing household server, the book club that runs itself, the expiring link, the new laptop, the Sunday backup
  • The neighbours — the commercial clouds, Syncthing, Seafile, Immich, the NAS suites: what each one trades
  • Limits — one machine, heavy extras, the admin's sight, and the upgrade treadmill, stated plainly
  • Troubleshooting — untrusted domains, the bouncing login, the 404 in the wrong wall, invisible files, and the hanging user-add
  • Glossary — the terms, collected in one place

What it doesn't cover

Running Nextcloud for anyone but a household or a small club — clustering, SSO and corporate identity, the enterprise add-ons — and exposing a server to the internet safely, which is a subject of its own (TLS gets a rule in chapter 3, not a tutorial). The built-in office suites and Talk calling are named and weighed, never installed; the desktop and mobile clients are described at the door they use, which the lab proved, and their own manuals take it from there.

How to use this guide

Read chapter 1 for the model and chapter 2 before installing anything — knowing which part holds what turns later confusion into a named problem. Chapter 3 gets a server running; chapter 4 with a browser open is the natural next sitting. Readers who mainly want the calendar should still detour through chapter 6: the door the calendar app knocks on is the one proven there. And chapter 11 is not the optional ending — schedule its Sunday recipe while your server is still young enough to rehearse a restore in minutes. The lab's transcripts live in nextcloud-lab/transcripts/; its notes are examples/lab-notes.txt.

Part of the series

This guide is one of the For Mere Mortals guides: plain-language guides to the tools programmers and makers use.

Related guides:

License

The writing in this guide is licensed under CC BY 4.0. Code examples and lab scripts are licensed under the MIT License.