Nextcloud instance on local network
How to get nextcloud kinda working on the local network (on Windows)
Things would have been rather easy with Linux I guess. But I had to install Nextcloud on a Windows laptop recently and here’s how I went ahead.
https://github.com/nextcloud/all-in-one/ also called as AIO is what is recommended for this. There is a section on how to run it on windows. It is basically a docker based setup.
So first thing we need is to install Docker Desktop.
It will take a restart to finish installation.
I had two errors after Docker Desktop was installed:
- Virtualiation technology was not enabled.
- WSL was not up-to-date.
Had to reboot into bios and enable “Virtualization” in BIOS settings for solving the first one. The second one was just a matter of installing wsl with wsl --update
With docker running, I had to run the following command:
docker run ^
--init ^
--sig-proxy=false ^
--name nextcloud-aio-mastercontainer ^
--restart always ^
--publish 8080:8080 ^
--env APACHE_PORT=11000 ^
--env APACHE_IP_BINDING=0.0.0.0 ^
--volume nextcloud_aio_mastercontainer:/mnt/docker-aio-config ^
--volume //var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock:ro ^
nextcloud/all-in-one:latest
Unfortunately the NEXTCLOUD_DATADIR directive wasn’t working correctly at all! So although I had --env NEXTCLOUD_DATADIR="/run/desktop/mount/host/c/Users/Sochara/Documents/NextCloud" ^ in the above, I removed it.
The APACHE_PORT directive is required to be able to run the thing behind a reverse proxy.
Running it behind a reverse proxy is necessary because AIO doesn’t work without an https certificate.
So I set up caddy as the reverse proxy like this:
https://nc.sochara.org {
reverse_proxy localhost:11000
tls {
dns cloudflare secretcloudflaretoken
}
}
This works because I was managing DNS via cloudflare and a token can be obtained via the cloudflare interface.
To run this we need a custom download of caddy which includes dns.providers.cloudflare from caddyserver.com/download.
We can make it a system service on windows using sc.exe as documented.
Similarly docker desktop can be enabled from task manager -> startup apps.
With all this setup, I had to go to https://192.168.0.19:8080 (where the computer I was installing this had 192.168.0.19 as the local IP), proceed with the SSL warning and let AIO finish installation.
Then, I had to change the hosts file at C:\Windows\System32\Drivers\etc\hosts and add this line:
192.168.0.19 nc.sochara.org
This would redirect all nc.sochara.org links to 192.168.0.19 (obviously this works only in the same network).
With this setup I was able to see nextcloud on a different computer.
But due to various issues related to DATADIR not being set correctly by nextcloud and network failures, I abandoned this idea.