How I setup Nextcloud

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Layout

My Nextcloud install is run on 2 vms and an LXC container, this is to spread the load over more servers.

web02 is the webserver, it runs nginx and only nginx php02 is the PHP server, all the data is stored here mysql02 is the DB server, it runs MariaDB docker swarm (2 nodes) is where I have the notify_push container

Installed things

Nginx has been installed from the nginx.org repo, if your on a pi and want a newer version. Go have a look at packages.sury.org

PHP is installed from https://packages.sury.org/php/ as it has PHP from 5.6 all the way up to 7.4, I use an Ansible role to get the repo setup and install all the things I need.

MariaDB is from the Debian repo, so a standard install. I have made changes to the my.cnf to make it run in 1GB of memory.

nextcloud gets installed from the zip file from nextcloud.com, I then do steps to move the old version left and setup the new version (more below).

Nextcloud steps

To get nextcloud upgraded or installed I follow this list of steps

New Install

• select a location for the install
• make any directories I need (e.g. mkdir /srv/www/)
• download the latest version from nextcloud.com wget https://download.nextcloud.com/server/releases/nextcloud-29.0.6.zip
• unzip the download unzip nextcloud-29.0.7.zip
• move to my own named directory mv nextcloud horwood-nextcloud
• copy in my backed up config cp /backups/config.php horwood-nextcloud/config/

upgrade

• goto were nextcloud is installed
  • cd /srv/www/
• download the latest version from nextcloud.com
  • wget https://download.nextcloud.com/server/releases/nextcloud-29.0.7.zip
• unzip the download
  • unzip nextcloud-29.0.7.zip
• move the old left and the new right
  • rm -fr horwood-nextcloud;mv horwood-nextcloud horwood-nextcloud.old;mv nextcloud horwood-nextcloud
• switch to the webserver user and run the upgrade
  • cd horwood-nextcloud
  • su www-data
  • php occ upgrade

Using the Redis session handler

If you are using Redis for locking and/or caching, you may also wish to use Redis for session management. Redis can be used for centralized session management across multiple Nextcloud application servers, unlike the standard files handler. If you use the Redis handler, though, you MUST ensure that session locking is enabled. As of this writing, the Redis session handler does NOT enable session locking by default, which can lead to session corruption in some Nextcloud apps that make heavy use of session writes such as Talk. In addition, even when session locking is enabled, if the application fails to acquire a lock, the Redis session handler does not currently return an error. Adding the following settings in your php.ini file will prevent session corruption when using Redis as your session handler:

redis.session.locking_enabled=1
redis.session.lock_retries=-1
redis.session.lock_wait_time=10000

Full example:

[Session]
session.save_handler = redis
session.save_path = "tcp://redis:6379?weight=1, tcp://redis:6379?weight=2&timeout=2.5"
redis.session.locking_enabled=1
redis.session.lock_retries=-1
redis.session.lock_wait_time=10000

More information on configuration of phpredis session handler can be found on the PhpRedis GitHub page

Published: 27 Feb 2025