Hey everyone,
After continually running into issues with previous specialty distros that were supposedly designed to make running a server easier, I’ve decided to try avoiding the middlewear and set something up from scratch myself on an x86_64 system with about 8gb of ram.
99.9% of what I use my server for is Nextcloud with Let’s Encrypt for SSL, so is like to choose a distro that is going to make setting this up and maintaining NC easy. I’ll also want to add in Spreed and Colabora.
Currently I’m thinking that Ubuntu Snappy with snaps for NC, Let’s Encrypt, Spreed and Colabora is probably the way to go. I’ve never used snaps before and haven’t researched this much yet though, so I wanted to check if this is the most sane direction or if there’s a better one.
I’m familiar with running Ubuntu, Debian and Arch systems, for what it’s worth.
So what base system would you recommend? I’d also be curious to hear opinions on the pros and cons of using Apache/Nginx, specifically for Nextcloud.
I’m not sure how much you can modify the snappy setup. Might be optimized for Nextcloud box. This is all pretty new, I haven’t used it so far and personally, I would give it more time.
I think any of these would be a good choice and it’s more a question which of these systems you are more familiar and more comfortable with.
Apache is officially supported. So you will probably have the least issues. However, there are many nginx users, so it shouldn’t be an issue either and you can probably get a bit more performance out of the same system. If you run other websites or stuff, the php-fastcgi-environment is better to deal with managing the permissions as on mod_php in apache all scripts runs as the apache-user.
I’m actually taking a look at UBOS at the moment. First impressions are that it’s deliciously easy to set up a VM with a a couple of automatically renewed Let’s Encrypt SSL sites. Main downsides are that it seems to have basically no community, be a one man, bus-factor of 1, show and doesn’t set up HSTS / memcaching when it sets up Nextcloud.
@tflidd covered off the apache/nginx bit I think. If you’re on good hardware performance likely won’t be dramatically different either.
As you’re familiar with Ubuntu, could you follow this guide I wrote? Ubuntu is my go-to generally so is what I’d always recommend.
Going with UBOS or other niche distros guarantees you’ll find it harder to get support should you get stuck, whilst Ubuntu, CentOS, etc has a visible community even here.
Of course there are also the official VMs, nothing stops you converting those to physical disk if you needed to.
You don’t know if there happens to be a VM that already has Ubuntu+NC+Spreed+Collabora? Ideally I’d love to find something I could just boot up in VirtualBox, run an install script and have a domain working with SSL/Let’s Encrypt.
Not sure if that’s too much to ask for though…
By “Spreed” I’m referring to having a spreed.me server and the spreed.me Nextcloud app set up to use it. Basically I’m hoping that there’s a VM I can just boot and run an install script and have NC running with Collabora and the Spreed.me app+server integrated with Let’s Encrypt SSL. Given how many people want to use NC+Collabora+Spreed+SSL together, someone has to have built something like this… right? Right? o.O (cue sound of crickets)