Install NextCloud On Ubuntu 22.04 LTS – Complete Guide

In this tutorial, we are going to see How to Install NextCloud On Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. This will be a detailed setup, we have provided steps to increase the performance of Nextcloud and apply all the security measures needed to secure the server.

Nextcloud is a file hosting system that allows us to store our content like documents, pictures, videos, etc, and share it with others.

Instead of relying on external service providers for our personal and business documents, Nextcloud gives us the freedom to store them on our servers or in trusted data centers. it’s a self-managed centralized document and file management system.

Below we provided a detailed step-by-step guidelines on how to install Nextcloud on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. To maintain high performance and security, we have added necessary steps to add more features on the system. Each steps are highly recommended to setup a production grade Nextcloud environment.

Step1: Install Required Packages

1. Update and Upgrade the Ubuntu Packages

apt update -y && apt upgrade -y

2. install Apache and MySQL Server

apt install apache2 mariadb-server

3. Install PHP and other Dependencies and Restart Apache

apt install libapache2-mod-php php-bz2 php-gd php-mysql php-curl php-zip \
php-mbstring php-imagick php-ctype php-curl php-dom php-json php-posix \
php-bcmath php-xml php-intl php-gmp zip unzip wget

4. Enable required Apache modules and restart Apache:

a2enmod rewrite dir mime env headers
systemctl restart apache2

Step2. Configure MySQL Server

1. Login to MySQL Prompt, Just type

mysql

2. Create MySQL Database and User for Nextcloud and Provide Permissions.

CREATE USER 'nextcloud'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'passw@rd';
CREATE DATABASE IF NOT EXISTS nextcloud CHARACTER SET utf8mb4 COLLATE utf8mb4_general_ci;
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON nextcloud.* TO 'nextcloud'@'localhost';
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
quit;

Step3. Download, Extract, and Apply Permissions.

Now download the latest Nextcloud archive file, Go to the Nextcloud Download Page. Or you can download from direct link: https://download.nextcloud.com/server/releases/latest.zip

1. Download and unzip in the /var/www folder

cd /var/www/
wget https://download.nextcloud.com/server/releases/latest.zip
unzip latest.zip

2. Remove the zip file, which is not necessary now.

rm -rf latest.zip

3. Change the ownership of the nextcloud content directory to the HTTP user.

chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/nextcloud/

Step4. Install NextCloud From the Command Line

We are going to install Nextcloud on Ubuntu 22.04 from the command line, it will save us time as we are providing all the database and admin credentials for installation. It will install Nextcloud silently, we don’t have to go through web setup. For detailed Nextcloud Command line installation, visit this page.

1. Run the CLI Command

cd /var/www/nextcloud
sudo -u www-data php occ  maintenance:install --database \
"mysql" --database-name "nextcloud"  --database-user "nextcloud" --database-pass \
"passw@rd" --admin-user "admin" --admin-pass "admin123"

If everything goes well the command will output “Nextcloud was successfully installed”. We provided a very simple user/password, during production setup, this must be a complex password.

2. nextcloud allows access only from localhost, it could through error “Access through untrusted domain”. we need to allow accessing nextcloud by using ip or domain name.

vi /var/www/nextcloud/config/config.php

  'trusted_domains' =>
  array (
    0 => 'localhost',
    1 => 'nc.mailserverguru.com',   // we Included the Sub Domain
  ),
  .....
:x    // saving the file

3. Configure Apache to load Nextcloud from the /var/www/nextcloud folder.

vi /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default.conf

<VirtualHost *:80>
        ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost
        DocumentRoot /var/www/nextcloud
        ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error.log
        CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access.log combined
</VirtualHost>

:x

• Now, Restart Apache Server

systemctl restart apache2

Now, Go to the Browser and type http:// [ ip or fqdn ] of the server, The below Nextcloud login page will appear.

The Basic NextCloud Installation on Ubuntu 22.04 is completed, Now we are going to Work on the Performance and Security.

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Step5. Install and Configure PHP-FPM with Apache

Here we will install PHP-FPM, which is faster than the mpm-prefork module, which is the default method of executing php files on Apache.

1. Install php-fpm

apt install php8.1-fpm
service php8.1-fpm status

2. Check the php-fpm version and Socket.

php-fpm8.1 -v
ls -la /var/run/php/php8.1-fpm.sock

3. Disable Apache prefork module

a2dismod php8.1
a2dismod mpm_prefork

4. Enable php-fpm

a2enmod mpm_event proxy_fcgi setenvif
a2enconf php8.1-fpm

5. set required php.ini variables

vi /etc/php/8.1/fpm/php.ini

upload_max_filesize = 64M 
post_max_size = 96M 
memory_limit = 512M 
max_execution_time = 600
max_input_vars = 3000 
max_input_time = 1000

:x

6. php-fpm pool Configurations

vi /etc/php/8.1/fpm/pool.d/www.conf

pm.max_children = 64
pm.start_servers = 16
pm.min_spare_servers = 16
pm.max_spare_servers = 32

:x

service php8.1-fpm restart

7. Apache directives for php files processing by PHP-FPM

vi /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default.conf

<VirtualHost *:80>

	ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost
	DocumentRoot /var/www/nextcloud

	<Directory /var/www/nextcloud>
          Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
          AllowOverride All
          Require all granted
	</Directory>

	<FilesMatch ".php$"> 
         SetHandler "proxy:unix:/var/run/php/php8.1-fpm.sock|fcgi://localhost/"          
	</FilesMatch>

	ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error.log
	CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access.log combined

</VirtualHost>

:x   // Save the File

service apache2 restart

Step6. Create info.php Page for PHP feature check

Create an info.php page, it will show us whether php-fpm, opcache, apcu are enabled with the php.

cd /var/www/nextcloud

vi info.php
    <?php phpinfo(); ?>
:x

Now Browse http://nc.mailserverguru.com/info.php, it will show “Server API FPM/FastCGI” if the php-fpm is enabled on the PHP.

Step7. Enable Opcache in php

Opcache is a caching engine for PHP. It stores precompiled script bytecode in shared memory, so parsing PHP scripts on each request won’t be necessary. It increases php file execution and website loading performance.

vi /etc/php/8.1/fpm/php.ini

opcache.enable=1
opcache.enable_cli=1
opcache.interned_strings_buffer=8
opcache.max_accelerated_files=10000
opcache.memory_consumption=128
opcache.save_comments=1
opcache.revalidate_freq=60

:x

• Now, Restart apache and php-fpm

systemctl restart php8.1-fpm
systemctl restart apache2

Now, Check http://nc.mailserverguru.com/info.php again, it will show the “Opcache is Up and Running”

Step8. Enable APCu in php

APCu is the user data caching. It is a local cache for systems. Nextcloud uses this for memory caching.

1. Install APCu

apt install php8.1-apcu

2. Configure Nextcloud to use APCu for memory caching.

vi /var/www/nextcloud/config/config.php

  'memcache.local' => '\OC\Memcache\APCu',
  
:x

• Restart php-fpm and apache

systemctl restart php8.1-fpm
systemctl restart apache2

Now, Check the http://nc.mailserverguru.com/info.php again, it will show the “APCu support Enabled”

Step9. Install and Configure Redis

In Nextcloud, Redis is used for local and distributed caching as well as transactional file locking. we used APCu for Local Cahing which is faster than Redis. We will use Redis for File locking. Nextcloud’s Transactional File Locking mechanism locks files to avoid file corruption during normal operation.

1. Install Redis Server and Redis php extension

apt-get install redis-server php-redis

• Start and Enable Redis

systemctl start redis-server
systemctl enable redis-server

2. Configure Redis to use Unix Socket than ports

vi /etc/redis/redis.conf

port 0
unixsocket /var/run/redis/redis.sock
unixsocketperm 770

:x

3. Add Apache user to the Redis group

usermod -a -G redis www-data

4. Configure Nextcloud for using Redis for File Locking

vi /var/www/nextcloud/config/config.php

'filelocking.enabled' => 'true',
'memcache.locking' => '\OC\Memcache\Redis',
'redis' => [
     'host'     => '/var/run/redis/redis.sock',
     'port'     => 0,
     'dbindex'  => 0,
     'password' => '',
     'timeout'  => 1.5,
],

:x

5. Enable Redis session locking in PHP

vi /etc/php/8.1/fpm/php.ini

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

:x

• Now, Restart php-fpm and apache

systemctl restart php8.1-fpm
systemctl restart apache2

Now, we can check Redis use, (by enabling the Redis port in the Redis configuration) by running the command “redis-cli MONITOR“, during Nextcloud loading it will show live data on the screen.

Now, that we have finished Performance improvement steps. We are going to work for the Security, First of all, we will install an SSL certificate for Nextcloud.

Step10. Install SSL and Enable HTTP2

1. We will install the LetsEncrypt certificate, so, first, we need the Certbot tools.

apt-get install python3-certbot-apache -y

2. with the Certbot tool, let’s request a Certificate for our domain.

certbot --apache -d nc.mailserverguru.com

• Please follow the Image, Provide your Email and Accept the Terms to generate the SSL

3. Enable apache HTTP2 module and configure site for the http2 protocols

a2enmod http2

vi /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default-le-ssl.conf

<VirtualHost *:443>

        Protocols h2 h2c http/1.1
        
        ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost
        DocumentRoot /var/www/nextcloud
  ......

:x    // Save

4. Now, Restart Apache

systemctl restart apache2

5. Test the http2 protocol, by sending an http2 request to the web server.

curl -I --http2 -s https://nc.mailserverguru.com/ | grep HTTP

HTTP/2 200

Or, we can Inspect the Browser while accessing Nextcloud URL, we can easily see the protocol column from the Network tab, and it will show h2 as the protocol which is http2.

6. HTTP Strict Transport Security, which instructs browsers not to allow any connection to the Nextcloud instance using HTTP, prevents man-in-the-middle attacks.

<VirtualHost *:443>
  ServerName nc.mailserverguru.com

<IfModule mod_headers.c>
    Header always set Strict-Transport-Security "max-age=15552000; includeSubDomains"
</IfModule>

</VirtualHost>

Step11. Pretty URL’s

Pretty URLs remove the "index.php“ part in all Nextcloud URLs. It will make URLs shorter and prettier.

vi /var/www/nextcloud/config/config.php

    'htaccess.RewriteBase' => '/',                              
:x

• This command will update the .htaccess file for the redirection

sudo -u www-data php --define apc.enable_cli=1 /var/www/nextcloud/occ maintenance:update:htaccess

So, this is it.. We have done our setup 🤗

If you want to learn more about Nextcloud, you can visit this YouTube Playlist

Now It’s Your Turn

I hope this guide will help you to Install NextCloud On Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. I have tried to show you every step in detail.

If you face any issue or have any drought on any stage, please let me know on the comment section below.

Thanks !! 👍