Nextcloud using docker-compose

Nextcloud is a great open source file hosting solution for all your needs. It can be used to store your files on your hardware, access it from anywhere and synchronize changes that you make. Files can also be shared with anyone using link sharing option.

Docker compose file

Nextcloud has the official docker-compose file that you can use to spin it up on your hardware. Examples can be found in the GitHub repository.

On thing that needs to be added is --skip-innodb-read-only-compressed option to mariadb service from version 10.7 and above. Here is a docker-compose.yml file that I use

version: '3'

services:
  db:
    image: mariadb:10.7
    command: --transaction-isolation=READ-COMMITTED --binlog-format=ROW --skip-innodb-read-only-compressed
    restart: unless-stopped
    volumes:
      - ./volumes/db:/var/lib/mysql
    environment:
      - MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD={secret_key}
    env_file:
      - db.env

  app:
    image: nextcloud:23-fpm-alpine
    restart: unless-stopped
    volumes:
      - ./volumes/nextcloud:/var/www/html
      - /media/usbdrive/{usb_drive_dir}:/var/www/html/data
    environment:
      - MYSQL_HOST=db
    env_file:
      - db.env
    depends_on:
      - db

  web:
    build: ./web
    restart: unless-stopped
    ports:
      - 8080:80
    volumes:
      - /etc/containers/nextcloud/volumes/nextcloud:/var/www/html:ro
      - /media/usbdrive/cloud:/var/www/html/data
    depends_on:
      - app

In the GitHub repository mentioned above you can also find db.env that needs to be placed in the same directory as docker-compose file. There is also a web directory that is used to build nginx service.

In my docker-compose file, I am using insecure version of the Nextcloud. I have another machine in my local network that is publicly accessible and does reverse proxy and encryption using nginx and LetsEncrypt certificates.

In  the rest of the article I will show how Nextcloud can be tuned to suit different needs.

Uploading big files > 512MB

If you want to upload big files to Nextcloud, some changes needs to be made. First add the following lines to your nextcloud/.htaccess file:

php_value upload_max_filesize 16G
php_value post_max_size 16G

Then make sure that nginx support large files. You can add the following line to server section of nginx config file:

client_max_body_size 16G;

More detail can be found in the official guide.

Nextcloud does not redirect to dashboard after successful login

For some setups Nextcloud does not redirect to home page after successful login and manual refresh is needed. This happens because Nextcloud attempts to detect whether the server is accessed via https or http. However, if Nextcloud is behind a proxy and the proxy handles the https calls, Nextcloud would not know that ssl is in use, which would result in incorrect URLs being generated. This could be easily fixed by adding the following to you config/config.php:

'overwriteprotocol' => 'https',

Change default landing page to "files"

Newer versions of Nextcloud land on dashboard page after successful login instead of files page as it was before. If you prefer to land to files page instead set this in you config/config.php:

/* Default app to load on login */
“defaultapp” => “files”,

Show local directories

Nextcloud can also be used to share files locally stored on the host. In order to do this, the folder to share first needs to be declared in docker-compose file. After it is available in docker container, "External Storage" plugin can be used to show the folder in the files page. This can be done using the following steps:

1. Enable "External Storage" plugin for Nextcloud
2. Go to "External Storage" settings page and setup the folder to share:

After this the folder will appear in the list of files.

Logging in as www-data user into docker container

If you are doing any changes to Nextcloud config files, quite often you need to login as www-data user. This can be done by issuing the following command and opening interactive shell for Nextcloud container:

docker exec -it --user www-data <container id> /bin/sh