Frequently Asked Questions - FAQ NCP

What is NextCloudPi?

NCP an officially recognized Nextcloud community project that provides a working Nextcloud instance out of the box in the form of SD card image for the Raspberry Pi, Odroid HC1 and other boards, x86 and ARM docker containers, and an installer for any Debian-based system.

Please note images are 64bit currently, if you have 32bit hardware like RPi2 and lower, the image will not boot. You can still try the curl installer or use the docker version.

How do I install NextCloudPi on a Raspberry Pi?

Follow :: How to install NextCloudPi

I get stuck at “NC not yet initialized…” / Nextcloud is so slow / failing randomly / getting server errors even with a fresh image?

Most commonly these things are caused by hardware problems.

  • Check your SD card: take it out, copy the whole image to your computer and then copy it back to the SD, assert that there are no read/write errors. Also check the md5sum after reading it again and confirm that it matches the md5sum of the image that you just copied.

  • Check your power supply. Many cheap power supplies are not stable enough for reliable functioning, the same applies for the USB-power adapters. Also try to have an external power supply for any external HDDs.

How can I access from outside my home network?

See How to access NCP outside local network

I have been updating through nc-update but why isn’t Nextcloud on the latest version?

nc-update only updates NextCloudPi related stuff, in order to upgrade the Nextcloud instance itself you use nc-update-nextcloud. See Staying up to date

Do I have to configure every entry in the WebUI and/or the TUI?

No. You only need to run the Wizard to have a working Nextcloud instance, everything else is optional.

Can I use an external USB drive with NTFS/FAT filesystem?

No. These do not support the linux user/permission system.

You can read/write to NTFS/FAT filesystems, but the permissions need to be set for the whole drive, which leads to many problems.

Secondly, the performance can be really bad in linux, and this is very noticeable on the pi.

For this reasons, this is not supported. Do it at your own risk.

How do I connect with SSH to NextCloudPi?

From ncp-web, activate SSH from the SSH option - see How to enable SSH using ncp-config or ncp-web

Is there a changelog?

Yes, it’s here

What are pre-set users/passwords on NextCloudPi?

There are no pre-set passwords, the following are randomly generated upon first access during activation.

  • User root password vagrant for the VM
  • For SSH: generated on demand on ncp-web SSH section.
  • For nextcloudpi.local:4443 ncp/<random> (stored and reset in nc-passwd)
  • For nextcloudpi.local ncp/<random> (stored and reset in nc-admin)
  • For Database user is ncadmin/<random in /root/.my.cnf>

When resetting passwords please note:

  • for user ncp in nc-admin following characters are not allowed: &#;'`|*?~<>^"()[{}$& (and spaces)
  • for user ncp in nc-passwd following characters are not allowed: ’ " (single/double quotes and spaces)

What user/permissions should I have to the external USB drive mount point, the ncdata and ncdatabase directory?

Directory User Group Permissions Permission mask
Mount Point root root drwxr-x–x 751
ncdata www-data www-data drwxr-x— 750
ncdatabase mysql mysql drwxr-xr-x 755

Why does NextCloudPi use Apache and not Nginx?

Read the blog post from web-archive of ownyourbits.com.

Why is my md5sum of the image file different than the md5sum on the site?

The md5sum on the site is the md5sum of the tar.bz2 file that you get after you download, not the image’s one.

Why dd command doesn’t burn the sd card correctly?

In dd command you need to specify the block device, not the partition. E.x.:

sudo dd bs=4M if=NextCloudPi_xx-yy-zz.img of=/dev/sda status=progress && sync

Can I boot NextCloudPi from a USB drive instead of the SD card?

Yes, read Raspberry PI 4 – Booting from USB Device (no microSD)

What if my ISP doesn’t allow me to open ports 80 and/or 443?

You can change the port in the apache virtual host files ( in /etc/apache2/sites-available ), but the Let’s Encrypt authentication process won’t work for you.

How do I set up Let’s Encrypt with blocked ports?

  • If you only have port 443 available, you can use the following workaround:
    Copy the code and after that try again from the web interface or sudo ncp-config
sudo wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nextcloud/nextcloudpi/beb9bc1ee2909a1ab6bfde7398ddf19a50d02478/etc/nextcloudpi-config.d/letsencrypt.sh -O /usr/local/etc/nextcloudpi-config.d/letsencrypt.sh
  • If you don’t have port 443 available, you will have to do it manually. You can use the Let’s Encrypt DNS challenge authentication for this ( wiki entry ).

Also, see this page on performance tips.

Where are the logs?

See this article List of Logs of NCP


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FYI - I’ve deleted following from chapter “What are preset users/passwords” (no longer true since a few updates)

  • For terminal pi/raspberry (root/1234 on Armbian)
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