Hi selfhosted! Hope you’re having a good day :)
I’m pretty new to self-hosting and have been traipsing through a minefield attempting to make NextCloud AIO work inside Docker. The instance runs for a few days/weeks and then starts getting extremely slow on the website, then dies entirely. Usually, either the ClamAV or Apache containers get stuck in an unhealthy state that no number of reboots or reinstalls can fix.
Quick context for how this all works. I have one machine that runs Proxmox and a group of VMs for various purposes. One such VM runs my Nextcloud. This VM is running Ubuntu 23.10, Docker, and the NextCloud AIO package.
Another VM hosts OpenMediaVault, which contains a set of SMB Shares mounted to the host VM that act as storage for NextCloud. The symlinks (I think I’m using that word right) on the host VM have user and group permissions updated according to AIO’s documentation. Proxmox is configured to boot this VM first, then boot the rest in sequence once the files are available.
Right now I’ve got Nextcloud handling Synchronization of Files, Calendars, Contacts, and Kanban boards via the Deck Extension. Everything else can be abandoned at this point, these are the only functions I’m truly using. If this gives you an idea for an alternative app I’d love to hear it.
So after AIO broke for about the 5th time in the 8 months since I started trying to self-host it, I’ve been looking at alternatives. Before I go that route, I want to try installing Nextcloud without Docker. Some of the posts I’ve read here suggest that the Docker distribution of NextCloud has serious issues with stability and safely installing updates.
I plan to make a new VM entirely for this, Distro undecided. I still want to run it as a VM and still use my SMB shares for bulk storage.
So where would I begin if I planned to install NextCloud directly to the VM rather than through Docker?
Nextcloud AIO is not the only way to run Nextcloud in docker. For example you can use the Nextcloud docker repository and docker-compose for which there are many examples. I’ve been running Nextcloud this way for many years now without any un-recoverable issues, and no issues at all that weren’t caused by me. Upgrading is also very easy since you simply increment the version in docker-compose.yml and restart the service.
That said the NixOS suggestion from @[email protected] looks really neat and I may try that out soon my self since I’ve never played with NixOS before and it seems like a good excuse to do so.
Keeping this in the back pocket in case the NixOS ideas don’t work out, thanks for sharing!