I’ve tried NextCloud before and didn’t really love it and I’m now happy with a combination of syncthing and LibreOffice. But my wife wants the full google drive, with sheets, docs etc. without the google, and I think NextCloud is my best option for that.
I’m and experienced *nix admin and already have a Linux server running with both VMs and docker containers and also have a working OpenVPN setup for remote access. But I found the NextCloud setup frustrating. We had a discussion about it (here I think) and determined that this was because NextCloud would rather sell their hosted service, so they don’t go out of their way to make the self hosted option easy. I get that and don’t hold it against them at all.
But, now that I’m wanting to try it again, I’m looking for pointers to guides for setting up self hosted NextCloud. I’ve searched, but nothing I found seemed like “the one”.


I currently run the official Nextcloud-AIO. No issues once I got the reverse proxy figured out. That was a bit of a pain at the time. Caddy hadn’t yet become a popular choice for reverse proxies.
I will say that Nextcloud really wants dedicated hardware, not a VM, or proformance will suffer. Still useable but it tends to to be a bit slower. Can’t vouch for the office suite as I just don’t use it.
I tried the AIO docker build I never got the file sync working at an acceptable level. Would be using piss all resources and still only syncing a few files a second.
Does installing bare metal make it faster, or is that not what you meant?
From what I’ve noticed, yes. Considerably.
I’m not knowledgeable enough to explain why, but something about running Baremetal --> VM --> Docker --> Nextcloud-AIO is massively slower than running Baremetal --> Docker --> Nextcloud-AIO. Hell, Nextcloud-AIO on a Pi4 was running faster than when I put it in a much roomier VM.
Someone tried to explain it to me but all I understood was that the databases don’t like that. Something about nested virtualization restricting performance.
Oddly I didn’t run into the same issue when I ran Nextcloud-AIO off of a Digital Ocean VPS. Not sure what they are doing differently, but that was running just as fast as bare metal.
I was running on unraid docker, so no VM and it was still awful ☹️
what does your name mean ? just curious :)
It’s all good. The name came out a random name generator a while back. I liked the name enough that I started using it generally for my fediverse presence. No meaning beyond that.
Oh nice. I like it !