Demo instances of 9-14 now live

Hi folks,

I’ve just finished setting up my demo environment for Nextcloud consisting of independent NC 9, NC 10 and NC 11 installations on a single dedicated server.

They currently reset back to stock on the hour, every hour so offer up to 60 minutes of testing.

All three installations are cached with Redis, SSL-enabled and have pretty URLs too, as described in my guide.

Credentials

Both the user and password are admin, have fun!

Links

Nextcloud 9
Nextcloud 10
Nextcloud 11
Nextcloud 12
Nextcloud 13
Nextcloud 14

Technical info

The installations run in LXD containers, each container is a full Ubuntu 16.04 LTS deployment with Apache, PHP 7 and a shared MariaDB container running separately.

Utilising ZFS and snapshots, the containers accessible via the links above are replicas of snapshots created from master containers. On the hour, the containers are destroyed, re-cloned, have some network configurations pushed back to them and restarted. This process takes about 30 seconds and is done in series, meaning only one server is down for about 10-15 seconds at a time.

The dedicated server only uses a single IP (it’s not an expensive server, you get what you pay for) and the LXD host therefore runs an Apache proxy to direct traffic to the private IPs of each container. The benefit of this is enabling SSL for three unique operating systems can be done by excluding the .well-known directory from being proxied, ensuring when LetsEncrypt tries to perform verification, it creates all verification entries on the LXD host and traffic - being excluded from the proxy - terminates on the host where the verification files sit. It’s immensely convenient.

Currently nothing is optimised, and performance can be improved, but I’ll get to that later.

I’ll also make LXD images available for all three versions at some point to allow simple, direct launching of a full Nextcloud LXD OS container, save having to install it manually; a little like the official VMs but on a much, much lighter hypervisor.

Feedback welcome!

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Oh nice. I’ll have a look when I get home.

Yup that’s broken. I’ve reinstalled NC twice now and still not getting anywhere.

The NC11 server is partially broken at the moment. I’ll look at fixing it later.

@sanook OK all fixed :sunglasses: DB issue I guess as dropping the DB and reconfiguring from scratch sorted the lack of app categories, and the error for the notification bell was due to a mixed-content https typo (yay proxying).

All three servers should now work :thumbsup:

Awesome! Thanks for taking the time to do it. I’d enjoy seeing how Collabora integrates with one too if y’all can get around to it.

The https://demo.nextcloud.com server has collabora integration for now. I’ll look into it :slight_smile:

I would by default enable some of the more common apps like calendar or contacts. Did you enable caching modules? It seems a bit slow considering the fact that you run it on a dedicated server.

Did you just log on now? It’s just finished a refresh which puts the atom server under a decent amount of load. I can add a couple of apps by default, though so can users since those servers are as they are on a fresh install :slight_smile:

Yes, I was just online before. It’s now much faster.

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When I move it to the new server I’ll likely stagger the refresh over 15 mins or so. As 12 and more releases drop I’ll have to anyway.

OK I’ve moved the servers to a 4Ghz 4GB RAM server which should already be resolving (IP ending 127).

Mostly to test the ease of which I can move LXD containers between hosts (quite easy) but if the performance is better I’ll leave them there.

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Nextcloud 12 beta has been added to the list of demo servers :slight_smile:

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Nextcloud 12 has now been upgraded to stable, link in the OP :slight_smile:

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@JasonBayton Are you the new Demo dev at Nextcloud? :wink:

What I do pales in comparison to the official NC demo setup, but I’m more than happy to offer mine for all major versions if they’re useful :slight_smile:

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So NC 12 is popular :smiley:

@JasonBayton Great Job!

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Looking for Nextcloud 12 LXD image for eval if anyone can point me to one. Thanks.

I’ve not spun one up yet. It’s on my list (and I’ll ping the LXD topic when it’s ready):

Demo servers 10, 11 and 12 have been upgraded to the latest release.

Custom themes will be applied soon to add a login message on the servers; the amount of failed login attempts I see per day is unreal :slight_smile:

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