Easiest and Quickest Way to Deploy Your Own NextCloud Using Portainer

Nextcloud is a open-source suite of client-server software for creating and using file hosting services. There are many ways to get it installed and here is my way to get it up and running as easiest and quickest as I can.

This post shows how to install NextCloud Docker using Portainer, and how map your own domain to your Nextcloud using Nginx and Cloudflare,

Create Your Cloud VM with Docker and Portainer Installed

1 Install Ubuntu or CentOS in the Cloud. Update it to latest.

Update and Upgrade Ubuntu to latest

$ sudo apt-get -y update && sudo apt-get -y upgrade

2 Install Docker

For CentOS:

sudo -i
yum -y update
curl -sSL https://get.docker.com/ | sh
systemctl start docker.service
systemctl enable docker.service

For Ubuntu
sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade
sudo apt install docker.io -y
sudo -i
systemctl start docker
systemctl enable docker
docker version

3 Install Portainer

docker volume create portainer_data
docker run -d -p 9000:9000 --name portainer --restart always -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock -v portainer_data:/data portainer/portainer
docker ps
Use your browser to access URL http://<public ip of your linuxserver>:9000
First time, it will ask you to set up admin user's password.

Create Your Nginx Container

Nginx is using Bridge network. Restart policy is also set to Always.

root@5fbe841d1f40:/etc/nginx/conf.d# apt-get update
root@5fbe841d1f40/etc/nginx/conf.d# apt-get install nano

Nginx configuration for Portainer docker.

root@5fbe841d1f40:/etc/nginx/conf.d# cat portainer.conf 
server {
    listen       80;
    server_name  opc1portainer.51sec.org;

location / {
    proxy_pass       http://132.145.9.41:9000;
    proxy_redirect             off;
    proxy_http_version         1.1;
    proxy_set_header Upgrade   $http_upgrade;
    proxy_set_header Connection "upgrade";
    proxy_set_header Host      $host;
    proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
    proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
    }
}

Create Your NextCloud Container

1 Create NextCloud Container

2 Add tcp 8080 into your cloud firewall or security group

3 Add DNS A record for your nextcloud domain url

4 Configure Nginx to use your own domain to access your NextCloud site

root@5fbe841d1f40:/etc/nginx/conf.d# apt-get update
root@5fbe841d1f40/etc/nginx/conf.d# apt-get install nano

root@5fbe841d1f40:/# ls
bin  boot  dev  etc  home  lib  lib64  media  mnt  opt  proc  root  run  sbin  srv  sys  tmp  usr  var
root@5fbe841d1f40:/# cd etc
root@5fbe841d1f40:/etc# cd nginx
root@5fbe841d1f40:/etc/nginx# cd conf.d
root@5fbe841d1f40:/etc/nginx/conf.d# ls
default.conf  portainer.conf  nextcloud.conf
root@5fbe841d1f40:/etc/nginx/conf.d# cat nextcloud.conf 
server {
    listen       80;
    server_name  nextcloud.51sec.org;


location / {
    proxy_pass       http://132.145.9.4:8080;
    proxy_redirect             off;
    proxy_http_version         1.1;
    proxy_set_header Upgrade   $http_upgrade;
    proxy_set_header Connection "upgrade";
    proxy_set_header Host      $host;
    proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
    proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
    }
}
root@5fbe841d1f40:/etc/nginx/conf.d#

5 Restart Nginx

Service Nginx Restart