Just had NextCloud denying my credentials (not for the first time). I know they weren’t wrong because I’m using a password manager. Logs didn’t say much. Was about to reinstall (again, not the first time nextcloud went bonkers on me) before I tried a docker compose down && docker compose up. Lo and behold after a restart the credentials worked again.
This stuff is just way too flaky for something so important.
Is OwnCloud good again? My main usecase is saving photos but I don’t want them locked away in a database so SeaFile is out.
Edit: I’m going to take the time to reply to you all, bit busy with work and family suddenly. But a little update - I’ve quickly setup Immich and fired up the CLI to import my library. AFAIK the files are still stored on disk somewhere but metadata is in a database. I didn’t realize this before, knowing that I think my mind is made up and Immich is the best solution. Thanks everyone!
What name do you assign the DB for PostgreSQL in Docker and does it by chance happen to match the name of any other containers, possibly in other docker compose files?
I’m only mentioning it because I experienced weird inconsistent issues with a service I was running where it was sometimes having trouble connecting to its DB companion and I eventually realized that it was sometimes connecting to the other container. I was also finding that turning it off and on again was often ‘fixing’ the issue, at least for a while. Might be worth checking out. I’d also consider viewing the logs for Nextcloud (
docker logs -f) when you’re unable to login and see if there are any errors. Frankly I’ve never had these specific issues with Nextcloud, and given that it’s based on PHP (it only ‘executes’ on an HTTP request), it seems like restarting shouldn’t help unless it’s something else.I run a separate instance of postgres since I also use it for a lot of other stuff.
it seems like restarting shouldn’t help unless it’s something else.
I’m honestly also baffled
use immich for photos.
owncloud ocis works but is very young. is literally just file hosting with something to open office files online.
https://github.com/simone-viozzi/my-server
those are my configs. you have both immich and owncloud.
So, now’s as good a time as any to ask. Why is everyone using Nextcloud? I’ve been quietly using Owncloud for a very long time and never had any issues with it. How is Owncloud bad?
This is a good summary, but the Tl;DR is that Owncloud has a non-open source Enterprise version with extra features you need to pay for, while Nextcloud is a fully open source fork.
the Tl;DR is that Owncloud has a non-open source Enterprise version with extra features you need to pay for
This isn’t any different than a lot of other softwares, though… Nextcloud has the same Enterprise pricing/features shit, too. https://nextcloud.com/enterprises/
Actually, so does Photoprism. https://www.photoprism.app/features
Most of the items on that list (with the possible exception of the ‘Enterprise Apps’) are items that involve them either hosting an aspect for you (push notifications), training, or utilizing their OAuth credentials with Microsoft. Because they forked OwnCloud they’re actually bound by the AGPL on that original code and legally can’t license features in the main codebase as anything other than AGPL (less sure on those ‘apps’), so they’re limited in what features they can restrict to paying customers.
Wouldn’t OwnCloud also be bound by the same AGPL on their code, then?
No, because these licenses can’t bind the copyright owner themselvess. AGPL is the terms that OwnCloud allows us access to it, but as it’s their code they don’t need a license to do whatever with it.
Let me put it another way - OwnCloud would be the only folks with standing to sue someone for violating the AGPL on their code. That means that the only people who could possibly sue OwnCloud for having a non-AGPL version is… OwnCloud. So even if the AGPL somehow claimed to bind the copyright owner it still wouldn’t work legally as the copyright owner just has to not sue themselves.
Owncloud is not fully open source. Nextcloud is. They have developed in different directions since then, but that remains the fundamental difference that split them apart in the first place. If that matters to you, Nextcloud is the right choice. If that doesn’t matter to you, then use whichever you prefer and has the features you need.
Thanks!
I just implemented authentik SSO for Nextcloud and other apps and it’s made my life easier.
Mine has randomly done that for the last few versions now. I also noticed it now maintains several cookies that I have to clear before I can log in successfully again.
I do have Redis configured with it, have never used their AIO image, and previously, the session ID was the only cookie. Haven’t kept quite up to date with NC’s development, but maybe it’s no longer using PHP’s session store in favor of its own mechanism?
Unfortunately, I’m too invested in NC to start switching everything to discrete apps, so I guess I just have to put up with it. :shrug:
Maybe try https://github.com/kd2org/karadav if you want to continue using the NC apps for photo backups.
That’s really cool. I’m giving Immich a try now but I saved your comment.
Maybe Immich might be a fit fit
I’m giving this a try now - it’s true it still saves the files on disk somewhere right? AFAIK at least so, this fits my requirements.
Yes it does, you can back up the files externally and everything if needed. You can also import external directories of existing photos.
The installation instructions talk about the yaml amd env file to dowmload and edit, in one of those you specify explicit path of where your files go
If your main use case is photos
My problem with nextcloud is more the performance of the web interface rather than it’s reliability (and that’s even with
mariadb+redissetup and a decently fast minipc). It’s fine if you avoid the web interface, but that’s part of the draw of the thing.The performance is indeed pretty terrible. Most stuff runs fine on my NUCs except nextcloud. Maybe throwing more hardware at it solves it though.
Nope lol I have a pretty godly server and nextcloud is slow as a mf
As someone with a beef server: Nope, performance stays unsatisfactory. Redis helps a lot but only if the page is cached which tbh just makes the experience worse if the page isn’t cached
There are more twerks to it than "just’ using mariadb and redis. Maybe look into Apache/nginx cacheing,tune your mariadb settings and stuff like that. Had performance-problems with my owncloud-instance, now it runs like a champ
Honestly the official docker images are hot garbage. I used them when I first tried NextCloud and they load incredibly slow. Shelved it for a while, realized there was a bunch of shit they already have that I was looking for, and gave it a go with my own Dockerfile starting from the PHP alpine image. That one runs waaaayyy better.
I have no experience with the docker container, but optimization for the database and nginx/apache cacheing must be made individually depending on number of cpu cores, ram-size, etc etc etc. When overtuning for example your database it can happen that you run out of RAM, which means your system will crash or freeze. Happened to me. I run it “Baremetal” and configured it “the classic way”. Tbh, after those optimizations it runs really, really fast and response times are really quick.
Fair, although I feel like performance should be better OOTB, particularly when I’m just using it as a single user. It is an old and complex application that does a lot, so it is understandable.
The poor performance carries over to the sync clients too because they’re just using webdav http requests. Nextcloud will take like 10+ hours to sync my folders, vs about 10 minutes with Syncthing or something else.
MariaDB runs like hot garbage with Nextcloud imo. I’ve gotten to the point where I use legit MySQL or PostgreSQL and performance is night and day. I have no idea why Maria acts out with Nextcloud for me, but I’ve gotten tired of troubleshooting it.
Interesting. MariaDB was the path of least resistance for me but I normally prefer PostgreSQL. I’ll put it on the list.
I’ve never really needed the web interface once everything was setup. Mobile app syncs my images and then I browse files through synced desktop clients. Never had any issues this way. I guess I’m not using the extra features some may be after in the webui.
I’m not done but I’m so tired of just stupid error messages that don’t help from developers. I love the open source community but for gods sake devs, handle your errors in a format that makes sense.
Nextcloud or others, it’s always the same. I either get a 200 line stacktrace that means absolutely nothing to me because the dev didn’t bother to handle the exception (like you submit a form and get a null reference back. It sure would be nice to know what field was null) or of course the infamous “Exception occurred” and nothing else.
My favorite was I tried to submit to Jellyfin a fix for one of their very opaque exceptions, keep the stack trace but rewrite the error message like “x exception occurred, do you have permissions to do that?” Or something and the PR was rejected. I just can’t even with that
I’m also a develop and my philosophy is that stack traces are for the developers but they should be translated to informative error messages for the user. Otherwise you’re doing security through obscurity.
My favorite was I tried to submit to Jellyfin a fix for one of their very opaque exceptions, keep the stack trace but rewrite the error message like “x exception occurred, do you have permissions to do that?” Or something and the PR was rejected. I just can’t even with that
Out of interest, which PR was that?
It’s uncommon to rewrite exception messages to be user friendly, they are for developers. The exception shouldn’t be thrown in the first place if it’s a common issue or the error message should be more generic for unhandled problems.
I strongly disagree with this, any error message shown to the user should be helpful to the user
I think you misunderstood, this is about exceptions, which shouldn’t be shown to users unless they ask for it.
Exceptions are not helpful to users most of the time, as shown above. They need instructions on how to report issues instead since they most likely can’t fix an unhandled exception by themselves.
Underrated comment.
To put it into user perspective:
Exception X with error code xxx means Y. Y should be shown via a modal dialog to the user. The state of the application has to be reverted to a valid state as error handling.
The exception/error gets logged, the user doesn’t receive a exception but the interpretation of the error is shown to him via the UI.
ehh I try to keep me here and my real github separate. I’m all for exception messages being for developers especially in logs, but things also shouldn’t error silently either. This was a case where there was something different with my OS I was running and I wanted to show an error that there was a common reason for that exception being thrown. This was years ago though, so I don’t remember details
I haven’t got this kind of issue with nextcloud, I’m pretty sure you can reset your password using occ via cli
I’m using the LSIO docker image and I could not locate the occ file to fire off the reset - but even then - I didn’t need to reset my password anyway…
That’s your problem, just there: you deployed a one size fits all blackbox of a container that, by definition, on top of pulling all the inefficiencies and redundancies of docker, isn’t tuned for your specific hardware and operational needs. I get the appeal of containers, but if you want to self-host responsibly, you’ve got to be in control of what’s running and how.
Sorry if this sounds harsh.
I honestly don’t see how my issues are related to docker. Sure the occ app was missing (or I just couldn’t find it, but the conclusion was that I didn’t even need it)
I’m running Linux so there’s not really any inefficiencies in regards to resources AFAIK - it’s just namespaces and cgroups.
I could give you plenty of reasons why you would be worse-off deploying from docker without deep understanding of what’s going on, but to only list a few out of the obvious pile:
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your container ships a bunch of things that you do not need and that take-up significant server resources. Not just nextcloud apps that you will never need but get loaded nonetheless, but also things like redis and a full-fledged collabora server that only make sense in a large-scale instances.
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your container isn’t tuned for your server because whoever made the container had no way to know that in advance. For instance, It might be that your php-fpm forks beyond your multithreading or IO capabilities, that your application cache isn’t adequate wrt. your system’s RAM memory, etc
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your containers duplicate functionalities from each other and from the operating system. You don’t need more than one http server, database, application process manager, interpreter, … but they add-up nonetheless and reduce the pool of available resources from the rest of the system and containers.
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For this exact reason I’m using NextCloud as a service. You can even install plugins.
It’s a trade-off ofc but it works rocks solid so far.
I’m not affiliated with that particular provider though.
Most likely you got blocked for some time by the brute force prevention. Have a look at your logfiles.
Maybe give Seafile a try?
Open source, you can selfhost, has clients for Linux/Win/Mac and Android/iOS and best of all - encryption that actually works.
My main usecase is saving photos but I don’t want them locked away in a database so SeaFile is out.
Shit. Missed that, sorry.
No problem! It’s good software but I’ve honestly been burned by applications that only keep this kinda stuff in databases. If you do daily backups/exports it’s probably OK but I don’t trust myself not to fuck it up.
This is my least favorite part of Seafile. If there were a competitive alternative that used a flat file storage backend then I’d switch to that in a heartbeat. But alas, I still have not found one, so I will continue into my 6th year of using Seafile…
Worth noting in 6 years I haven’t had any actual trouble with Seafile’s storage, and the few times I’ve needed to I’ve been able to export data to a normal file system using seaf-fsck even if Seafile isn’t running. I’m just not 100% comfortable with it anyway so I understand the apprehension. I’d rather use a standard filesystem and be able to use standard tooling on it.
Honestly this is why I’ve resisted going to seafile. I’ve been using owncloud for a while and it’s been solid, but it’s not my favourite thing in the world.
I almost don’t dare to say this, but I’ve been running the snap for more than a year and have no complaints.
Glad someone said it out loud 😁 I’ve been running the snap for almost three years now 24/7. I works really well!
Too daring of you to say snap
I’ve been on the snap version for three years with zero problems. It was originally created as a VM on virtualbox, then ported over to proxmox. Every OS and instance upgrade has gone off without a hitch so far.
6 years here and went from ubuntu 16 to 22
You installed nextcloud with snap? HOW DARE YOU!
