How to create a group folder?

sailor · December 21, 2018, 2:56pm

Nextcloud 14

I have overall admin rights and created a new group. I am also the admin of this group.

How can I create a group folder for this group?

(I am a newbie to NextCloud, the installation and the first set-up was made for me.)

I appreciate your helping coments.

JohnWalker · December 22, 2018, 3:33pm

Hey sailer,
welcome to nextcloud

Did you have installed the Group Folders App?
After that you can find in your admin settings a tab with Group Folder. There you can manage your group folders.

sailor · December 23, 2018, 2:14am

Hi JohnWalker,

Thanks for getting back.

We still have some problems. We is my brother (the IT expert) and me. We have 8 hrs of time difference, thus, a quick communication, joint working is not possible.

We both have admin rights. for the entire NextCloud installation. Other users will only have less and are restricted to their Groups.

He installed the Group Folder App and set up the needed group folders. However, inside these group folders I cannot

Delete any file or folder,
Can neither read nor download a txt-file my brother created
Cannot create a txt file (I can create folders)
Picture files (jpg, jpeg) are getting multiplied automatically.
I cannot access the Group Folder App at all; in non of my menu do I find an item related to group folders.

Based on my current experience with the Group Folder App, I consider the planned/intended functionality of the Group Folder App very good but it appears to us as “green banana”, too bugy for use yet.

Should you have a remedy to our problems, this would be very fine.

I appreciate your comments.

shopmin · December 23, 2018, 10:56am

Unfortunately I can’t understand your problems because everything works for me.
Following but again the individual steps:
In the admin area at the settings you can see the menu entry. Nowhere else.

A group and a group folder must be created:

The user must be assigned to the group.

Then everything should work.

sailor · December 23, 2018, 12:29pm

@shopmin
Thanks for your reply.
With your screenshot I finally found the menu point for the group folders. This point is solved.

I create a new group where all members have members have add, share, and delete rights.

I still cannot

Delete any file or folder,
Can neither read nor download a txt-file my brother created
Cannot create a txt file (I can create folders)
Picture files (jpg, jpeg) are getting multiplied automatically.
From my desktop I cannot upload any file

What could be wrong?
What should be checked?

Thanks in advance for helping comments.

shopmin · December 23, 2018, 1:16pm

Are you sure you’re really a member of the group?
Did your brother possibly share the file with the group (i.e. not create it in it…) and perhaps not give you the necessary permissions to edit it?

Sorry, but otherwise I can’t help you.

sailor · December 24, 2018, 2:58am

@shopmin

Thanks for your comments. Based on them I made a checks and tests.

Membership in groups

I checked again and I am a member of the group where we saw the problem first (Group FMB) the group folder is also FMB
I also created another group (TestR) and created another Group Folder (TestR) and I am also a member there.
Both groups have in their folder Write, Share, and Delete rights.

Additionally I have overall admin rights for the entire NextCloud installation.

Document creation

In “All Files” in can create files and folders and files in newly created folder. As long as they are not group folders I can create, edit and delete documents
In any group folder which I can create and I am a member of the group I cannot create a documents
I created a document in “All files” and could move it into the FMB Group folder. Once it is inside the group folder I can edit this document but cannot delete it.

Upload into

Any All Files - but not group folder works fine (using the “+” button or drag&drop

Any group folder or sub-folder of a group folder is not possible. Using the “+” button or drag&drop shows the upload progress bar is moving but the end I get the error message "path needs to be relative to the system wide data folder adn point to a user specific file.

Group folder works on my Android phone; files are to be seen on desktop machine in the internet browser

Delete

Works in All Files but nor group folder

Does not work in group folders on my Android but not on desk top machine. Android shows error message: “malformed server configuration”

Does this all give you an idea what is wrong and what is a remedy?

Thanks for your continuing help!

cenix102 · April 16, 2020, 10:47am

Hi everyone,

I have exactly the same problem with my nextcloud 18. Did you found the problem?

Thanks a lot for you comment!

pbear62 · April 21, 2020, 1:20pm

I have a small NC production instance that until recently was running NC 15. I was using Group Folders under 15. I upgraded to 17 and still have no issues with group folders.

I have a test instance running NC18 in a container. Group folders work fine.
The only thing I can think is perhaps the permissions were set incorrectly when you created the group folder. When adding the group verify you have write/share/delete permissions set (to start at least).

If it still does not work, perhaps dumping group folders tables from the database:

oc_group_folders oc_group_folders_acl oc_group_folders_groups

MariaDB [nextcloud]> select * from oc_group_folders ;
+-----------+-----------------+-------+-----+
| folder_id | mount_point     | quota | acl |
+-----------+-----------------+-------+-----+
|         1 | Nextcloud_users |    -3 |   0 |
+-----------+-----------------+-------+-----+
1 row in set (0.001 sec)

MariaDB [nextcloud]> select * from oc_group_folders;
+-----------+-----------------+-------+-----+
| folder_id | mount_point     | quota | acl |
+-----------+-----------------+-------+-----+
|         1 | Nextcloud_users |    -3 |   0 |
+-----------+-----------------+-------+-----+
1 row in set (0.000 sec)

MariaDB [nextcloud]> select * from oc_group_folders_acl;
Empty set (0.002 sec)

MariaDB [nextcloud]> select * from oc_group_folders_groups;
+---------------+-----------+-------------+----------------+
| applicable_id | folder_id | permissions | group_id       |
+---------------+-----------+-------------+----------------+
|             1 |         1 |          31 | nextcloud_user |
+---------------+-----------+-------------+----------------+
1 row in set (0.001 sec)

The group folder ACL should be set to 0.
The group_folder_group permission should be set to 31.

Then verify the ownership/permissions of the file system (On a linux based machine)

root@acdb1fbc1e14:~# ls -ld /var/www/html/data/__groupfolders/
drwxr-xr-x. 2 www-data www-data 6 Apr 20 18:44 /var/www/html/data/__groupfolders/
root@acdb1fbc1e14:~# ls -Rl /var/www/html/data/__groupfolders
/var/www/html/data/__groupfolders:
total 0
drwxr-xr-x. 2 www-data www-data 24 Apr 21 08:59 1

/var/www/html/data/__groupfolders/1:
total 580
-rw-r–r–. 1 www-data www-data 593508 Apr 21 08:59 Birdie.jpg
root@acdb1fbc1e14:~#
root@acdb1fbc1e14:~# ls -Rl /var/www/html/data/__groupfolders
/var/www/html/data/__groupfolders:
total 0
drwxr-xr-x. 3 www-data www-data 40 Apr 21 09:13 1

/var/www/html/data/__groupfolders/1:
total 580
-rw-r–r–. 1 www-data www-data 593508 Apr 21 08:59 Birdie.jpg
drwxr-xr-x. 2 www-data www-data 6 Apr 21 09:13 nc1_test

/var/www/html/data/__groupfolders/1/nc1_test:
total 0

All folders and files should be owned by www-data:www-data.
All folders should have permissions set to rwxr_xr_x
All files should have the permissions set to rwxr–r–

if all of that is true… I dunno.
If any of it is incorrect, the safest thing todo is to remove the group folder and re-created it using the NC interface.

say · January 26, 2023, 12:13pm

Hi,

i have another question for creating a group folder. Does the user who wants creating the group folder needs to be system admin or is it possible that a normal user can create a group folder?