Glad to help!

Yeah, self-hosting often means trading more control for less convenience, some times more than others. Either way, I hope this setup works for you!

Note: For Material files, and most file managers really, nextcloud might not show up by default (“security” or something), but you can “add external storage” and give it permissions.

CF = content framework, android somehow decided that users shall not see and interact with “real” files and instead, have apps like nextcloud act like content providers and expose a file-like API …whatever, it is what it is, but in the end it works.

I’m currently using Material Files, but even android’s default file manager, bundled with the OS, shows Nextcloud in the left sidebar (your mileage may vary on this one, as each phone vendor tend to customize it a bit).

As for my setup, there’s really not much to it: I selfhost nextcloud, have KeePassDX and the Nextcloud app, and when you setup KeePassDX, select “Open existing vault” and in the sidebar you should be able to select Nextcloud and pick files from there.

I see where you’re coming from. I also really wanted that in my early days of android and nextcloud. Turns out, nowadays you don’t really need that for most use cases, and definitely not for KeePass syncing. Nextcloud app for android exposes all the files via content framework and KeePassDX can sync two ways via that. Other apps like Keepass2Android even have direct nextcloud support via WebDAV, though these days I prefer KeePassDX a little bit more for unrelated reasons.

I recommend you try either KeePassDX or Keepass2Android and see for yourself.

Also, most file managers support CF and will show you your nextcloud files as if they were real files on the device, even without “real” two way sync, and most other apps will be able to save & open files directly from nextcloud.

I use KeepassDX syncing via Nextcloud, works flawlessly. I also used to use Keepass2Android, also works very well.

Can you elaborate on the “nextcloud doesn’t support 2-way syncing on android” statement? I can sync my Keepass database back and forth without issues.

Signed developer certificates protect you from MITM attacks, it does not protect you from the sources themselves being compromised.

Very true, and that’s why f-droid building from source can only guarantee the apk matches the source, but you still need to trust someone else (or yourself) to study the source and confirm nothing shady is going on, which of course isn’t something most people would do for any open source app they install.

Still, for “high profile” cases it just take one (independent) person to go through the source and publish their findings.

Yes, I understand the situation is shady and f-droid maybe didn’t handle it the best way on a human level, and that is important when evaluating trustworthiness.

What I was focusing on was more on the technical side: As long as I can:

• trust f-droid to actually build from source and only publish something guaranteed to match the source, and
• read the source code myself, or trust an independent researcher to study it, and confirm there’s no malware,

then I don’t need to trust the maintainer of the project at all, and I can ignore all the drama, being assured with a high degree of certainty there is no malware

I can also ignore any drama involving f-droid as long as I still trust them to build from source. This can also be verified by independent researchers by buulding themselves ans comparing, once again filtering out the drama and noise, though most people probably won’t go this far.

I don’t use syncthing (anymore) and didn’t know the story behind this, but one thing I know is, f-droid builds the apk from source and signs it with their keys, or if reproducible builds are available, it verifies the signed apk provided by the maintainer to match bit-for-bit with the source code, so at least even if one doesn’t trust the new maintainer, they should be able to trust f-droid that the apk matches the source, so e.g. no spyware or malware was added for example. Sure, someone still needs to review the source, of course.

I guess what they’re saying is, even though it’s “not supported” officially, you can still try and there’s good chances it’ll work anyway. If you need or prefer to stick to a supported configuration, it seems your options are either to switch to podman and figure out nextcloud, or switch away from RHEL.

I had heard they had rewritten it in go and got a lot more performant, not sure what else they have done. I don’t care much about the politics as long as it’s still open source (is it?).

That said, I’m a happy nextcloud user and I don’t see a reason to switch (after moving both data and db onto SSDs it’s much faster, so maybe php wasn’t the bottleneck).

Well, here’s the official “community maintained” docker repo:

https://github.com/nextcloud/docker

https://hub.docker.com/_/nextcloud

There’s a section about docker compose, I have my own scripts but I believe I derived them from there at some point (my memory is a bit fuzzy). I use the fpm-alpine image, if it matters.

Yeah, their AIO setup is just bad, the more “traditional” and community supported docker compose files work well, I’ve been using them for years. They’re not perfect, but work well. Nextcloud is not bad per se, but just avoid their AIO docker.

Same, I use the fpm-alpine image with mariadb, though if I had to start today I’d probably pick postgres instead. Other images are probably fine too.

And you don’t have your notification bar on the phone full of upload errors?

I get a bunch of upload errors for photos that I delete or move before nextcloud has a chance to upload them, those are safe to ignore. Not sure which errors you’re getting…

Can you get to older photos in under an hour, while Nextcloud slowly loads one thumbnail per second?

Forget about the plain nextcloud photos app, use the Memories app (incl. the android app).

Not as good as immich, from what I understand, but if you already have nextcloud, or need more than just photos, it works well.

It is really unbeleviable how there are some people for whom Nextcloud just works, and the rest of us.

It’s definitely not perfect, but since I was able to set it up to work well for me, I’m keeping it, at least until I have time to install immich and figure out how to sync the two (and maybe get a more powerful server to use its ML features). I’m currently running it off of a decade old chromebox …

I have years worth of photos backed up from my phone (android) on Nextcloud, it’s working pretty well… but it matters how you set up the auto upload and a few other things, and I’mnot claiming it’s without issues.

For example, I set it to move files into Nextcloud’s folder after uploading, so they appear as locally synced, and can be deleted to free up space if needed (maybe even automatically, not sure). Also, I set it to also upload existing files, because since they get moved, anything that’s still there clearly needs to be uploaded.

There are a few issues viewing media from the app, sometimes, but I use the Memories app :)

I’ve been meaning to try immich, looks pretty good, but I use Nextcloud for much more than just photos, so I’d have to keep both and have them sync somehow, and I’m not sure how to do that.

Was this with podman or rootless docker?

I also would like to switch to rootless, I have some experience with podman and, while I generally like it, it’s not 100% compatible with (rootful) docker, and can have performance issues if you’re not careful, especiallt with certain file systems like btrfs. I wonder if rootless docker is now better than podman, or preferred for some other reason.

If I understand correctly, nextcloud automatically updated … which I didn’t think it would, normally. Maybe it’s a “feature” of the AIO docker image?

Never upgrade to the latest and greatest of … anything really, especially in production. Let others test it first, or as suggested already, have a staging environment where you test the upgrade first. I guess you can still downgrade nextcloud though, especially if you have a backup.

Are you using the AIO image? I don’t know how well that works, but yeah, I absolutely hate automatic updates like that. I tried it once and I decided to use the plain “official but not supported” docker image instead, where I manage things myself. Never had an issue, and I can control which version I’m running, I can backup to wherever I want, using whichever system I want, etc.

If you want people to take you seriously about being open source, you need to have a git repo, like github, gitlab, etc. you can even self host one. Heck, you can even use a different (non git) DVCS, but not just a link to a cloud drive…

That’s possible, I’m using Firefox, is that something firefox would do?