 So I've had a next cloud server that I've had up and running for about three years and the operating system on that next cloud Server had reached end of life actually a long time ago So I've known for a while I need to spin up a new next cloud server So I blew away the old server and I went over to digital ocean and I spun up a cheap Digital ocean droplet running a boon to LTS server 2004 and I had my new next cloud server up and running and seriously like five minutes It's amazing how easy some of this stuff has become in recent years and here is my next cloud side here So this is my dashboard What we're looking at here is this very customizable dashboard You can set backgrounds to solid colors or images You can pin all kinds of information to your dashboard right now on mine when I log in what you're seeing here Is I've got pinned to my reddit news feed So this is the subreddits that I'm subscribed to some of the latest stuff from those and then mastodon Notifications and then my get lab to-do list if I wanted to I could customize it with things like weather Information upcoming events. So this is like your calendar stuff. You've got any scheduling or appointments or anything It would show that Email so if I wanted to pin emails here, you know It would show me like the last five or ten emails or whatever for those of you that use next cloud for Webmail of course what I really need next cloud for you know Like the really killer feature of next cloud is what it was originally intended for was file syncing And that's what I use it for to sync files to different devices, you know My various computers and mobile devices and everything So these are folders here and folders and documents that are hosted locally on this machine But they're being synced to all my other machines if next cloud is installed on those for us the client the syncing client and For example, here's my org folder here on my home computer And you know, it's got various sub directories with various org documents in those and that's how I sync those Documents to different devices. So if I'm working on something on a org document on this computer When I go and get on the other computer that's in a different room in the house I still have access to that org document, you know that I was working at on this computer So that's really the killer feature for next cloud that I use but you could use next cloud for anything You could view your photos if you have like a massive photo gallery or something that you wanted to view I don't really have any photos here. We have a talk client, which is like a chat client I think it's almost like a jitsie or may even use jitsie on the back end If you actually wanted to do like a video chat with somebody you have mail here I don't use next cloud for email But if I wanted to I could set it up to use it kind of like as a web mail service similar to something like gmail You have a contacts here So if you wanted to especially if you were syncing to multiple computers including your mobile devices That's kind of nice to have your contact information shared amongst everything and of course I have a calendar here One interesting thing is there are several themes as far as color schemes You know like the CSS themes that you can download and just enable right now I'm using the breeze dark theme for next cloud So it kind of matches like the breeze dark theme and like your KDE Applications if those of you that are on KDE plasma and as I said, it's really easy to get this stuff installed next cloud was Surprisingly simple So I made some notes here in Emax as I was going through the installation because I thought I needed to take notes because it might Be something complicated if I ever come back, you know a couple years from now have to go through the same process But honestly, I probably didn't need to bother to take these notes But most of these notes by the way came from actual digital ocean documentation like if you look up Digital ocean next cloud for example in your favorite search engine You're gonna get information on how to set it up on a boon to 20 04 1804 16 04 You know, whatever operating system you're wanting to use on that particular server For me, all I did was I spun up a really cheap a boon to LTS 20 04 server and then I SSH'd into that machine and I did a sudo apt update and and sudo apt upgrade to actually Upgrade all the software because 20 04 is not a rolling release distro, right? So you do need to do an update before you start installing stuff And the other thing you need to do and you don't want to only have the root user on the system You should add a non root user and make sure that non root user has sudo privileges. So I did a add user name So if you were your name was Peter and you wanted your user name to be Peter do add user Peter If you need to you could add Peter to the sudo group, which you probably should do so do user mod dash lowercase a capital G sudo to add him to the sudo group and then name Peter if that was the case Obviously, you probably want your own domain name and of course you want that domain name to be pointed to this server And then once you do that install next cloud and how do you install next cloud? Well, you do a sudo snap install next cloud. That's right next cloud has a snap Snaps are enabled by default on a boon to server sudo snap install next cloud boom You're done And if you want to verify that that actually worked run a snap changes next cloud Which is just a random snap command you could do snap info next cloud or something like that You'll get some output in the terminal that just verifies that your snap install next cloud actually worked And then the next thing you want to do is actually set up an administrative account for your next cloud instance This can take a couple of minutes But you want to run the command sudo next cloud dot manual dash install And then the name of the user and the password for that user and this is for your next cloud Login, so your login is DT You know name needs to be DT and then password needs to be a legit Secure password like a super strong password. Don't do password one two three four guys I know a lot of you guys do that. No, it's really dangerous when you enter this command You won't get any output for probably a minute or two. Don't worry It's it's running through an installation, but eventually you're gonna get some output that says next cloud was successfully Installed and then after that what you need to do is you need to make sure that you add your domain name If you're using a domain name, it needs to be a trusted domain So if you run this command here sudo next cloud dot OCC space config colon system colon get Space trusted underscore domains kind of a long come convoluted command But you run that command you're gonna get some output and the only output you're gonna get is local host You're gonna get one word because local host is the only trusted domain at first But you rerun that command except this time instead of get you use set Trusted underscore domains space one space dash dash value equals the actual domain You're adding as a trusted domain. So example dot com would be whatever domain You're actually adding and then what you're gonna do is you're gonna go back and rerun This one here that before only listed local host now It should actually list two things that should list local host and example dot com in the output And that's how you know that command worked and next of course you want to set up SSL You want to go ahead and Run let's encrypt. So by default Ubuntu has a firewall installed called ufw It may or may not be enabled on your digital ocean droplet But what you want to do is make sure that you allow ufw the uncomplicated firewall make sure you allow it to use ports 80 and 443 so make sure those are enabled before you run through this let's encrypt stuff Otherwise let's encrypt is not going to work. And then what you want to do is run this command here sudo next cloud dot enable dash HTTPS space let's dash encrypt and that's going to request let's encrypt for a Certification for a certificate it's going to ask you do you meet several requirements in the output and you just type Why for yes, and then after that is going to ask you for an email address give it a legit email address That's important and also it's going to ask you for the domain name that you're requesting the certificate for so if it's example Dot com type example dot com and that's seriously all that's needed to install next cloud at that point You're ready because you've already installed next cloud You've already set up an administrative name and password for login So all you need to do at that point is actually go to for example example dot com whatever domain that you've got the thing pointed to and then log in with the credentials that you had typed earlier and then after logging in That's when you go and you decide exactly how you want to set up your next cloud Like do you need all of these apps these apps by the way here or not installed by default by default You get the dashboard files photos and activities. I specifically installed talk mail Contacts calendar just to see how the installations of those particular apps went but if I wanted to I could go over here and click apps and it will give me a list of the apps that are Installed and the list of apps that I potentially could install So these are the active apps, but if I wanted to I could go to app bundles here And there's actually these bundled packages of various apps that are kind of designed to work together like the enterprise Bundle and the hub bundle and group wear and social sharing and the education bundle And I had actually never knew this It's got some categories over here I never noticed this games category if I knew there were some games I could install that would I would have Already installed some of them and tested them out But maybe I'll do that after I'm finished with this video for those of you that are looking for color schemes What I did is I went to what is it the customization category and that's where I found breeze dark and then I enabled that Also under categories this one here integration now This is where you can integrate with some other third-party programs and that's how I got on my dashboard How I got the get lab integration mastodon integration and the reddit integration So again, if I go to my dashboard, let me open that up That is how I've got these on the dashboard I enabled those and then I went to the dashboard and customize and then I made sure to tick The ones that I actually wanted to be pinned here Now I don't know if I'm gonna use all the features that I could in next cloud I doubt I will really I only have next cloud for the file singing That's really all I use next cloud for is just a sync files between devices I probably will never use it for email or contacts or calendar But many people if you're already using webmail, you're probably will use those features I'm one of those weird people. I don't like webmail. Yeah, I like doing things locally with desktop clients And I like saving old even I like being able to view email offline So, you know, that's why I have weird stuff like I've you email and emacs for example But I think for most people you probably would use next cloud as your email client I don't see why you wouldn't overall I'm really impressed with how mature next cloud is like every time I look at it every time They have new releases and they're adding new features. I really am seriously amazed at this piece of software It's probably one of the most impressive pieces of free and open source software on the planet I'm also legitimately impressed with Ubuntu server. It's has really been my favorite server operating system for a number of years When I first started, you know, spinning up web servers like in the mid 90s You know, I was in the early days of the web. I was already getting into building websites No back then everybody used Red Hat servers or Debian servers and for a long time. That's kind of what I did I did Debian. I did CentOS, but really four or five years ago I kind of started using Ubuntu server and I kind of like it and now with snaps I know a lot of people like to throw shade on snaps But snaps really make sense on servers because that next cloud install with the snap if I didn't install next cloud with the snap I would actually have to go install all the dependencies for next cloud Meaning the full lamp stack, you know I'd have to install the Apache server and PHP and my sequel and all of that stuff and I'd have to go configure Apache I didn't have to do any of that. sudo snap install probably saved me You know 15 minutes to 30 minutes worth of work just because I didn't have to go set up that lamp stack And the other thing I really like about having my own next cloud server is I don't have to depend on Third-party services for my file syncing especially proprietary services. I got away from Dropbox Two or three years ago. I used to use Dropbox and it's fine I never had any issues with it, but can you really trust Dropbox? Are they scanning your files? And you know are they data mining you you don't know because again some proprietary service You know I would much rather use free and open-source software on a server that I maintain and With how easy it is to spin up these things over at digital ocean I don't know why everybody doesn't maintain their own next cloud server and before I go I need to think a few special people I need to think absy Dallas Gabe Lou Mitchell Allen Akami Archfiend by 30 Chuck David the other David Dylan Gregory Louis Paul Polytech Scott Steven Smith and Willie these guys They're my highest tiered patrons over on patreon without these guys this quick video about setting up a next cloud server It wouldn't have been possible The show is also brought to you by each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen all these names you're seeing on the screen right now These are all my supporters over on patreon because I'm sponsored by the community I asked for your support look for distro tube over on patreon. All right guys. Peace. I Wonder if next cloud can be app-imaged