just reading this article (sorry in german). The perfect opportunity to remind all Mac OS X users that Nextcloud offers all the axed Calendar an WebDav functions in OS X Server. And of course that a small Linuxbox is much more cost-efficient than a Mac.
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In English:
Calendar, Contacts, Messages (with the Talk app) and Wiki (with the PicoCMS app) can be replaced by Nextcloud. Of course, they donāt list Nextcloud as an alternative (who would expect anything different from them, actually).
First: I use Nextcloud myself - love it. But as far as I can see there is no official support of Nextcloud on macOS. Maybe that is a reason for them. Anyway I will go on with Nextcloud an recommend it whenever I am asked (or not 
).
What do you mean with āofficial supportā? Itās WebDAVā¦
Oh maybe I was unprecise. I think there is no port/package/dmg for macOS. To be honest I never tried to use the official nextcloud tarball on macOS. Web/Cal/CardDAV are of course supported by macOS out of the box and it works like a charm!
Hosting Nextclod on MacOS is not supported. Using MacOS as a client is well supported with *DAV and official client packages exist as well.
You can read a bit more about reasons for not supporting MacOS as a server here:
Ah understoodā¦ if you really want to use your Nextcloud Server on a Mac, youāre still free to do this within a VM. Of course a small bare-metal linux-box would do the same job IMHO much better. I love the little Zotac Nano C1327 Boxes, all power (4 Cores) and Connectivity you need (2x1GB LAN, 1xWLAN) and it costs only 150,- (barebone).
I successfully run one of mine on VMware fusion on MAC and also run another instance on VMware workstation on a 2016 server. Works like a charm!
Well, in a VM, but not directly on MacOS or Windows.
I have to admit, running Nextcloud Server on a Mac is actually kind of āexoticā, however, there ARE people having GOOD REASONS for doing this (- all the more after Appleās latest limitations of its macOS Serverā¦)
I am one of these guys, and just two days ago, Iāve succeeded in setting up a Nextcloud Server on one of my Macs, running like a charm!
Iām engaged in this topic since the early stages of ownCloud, and back then OS X actually WAS a supported platform for the ownCloud Server, and I had an instance up and running.
But then, the ownCloud devās ran into several compatibility issues (eg. by dealing with special characters in directory names etc), that understandably led them to discontinue their OS X support for the Server (not the clients, of course!), and concentrate on Linux. So, I moved my instance to a shared hosting. This works well, however, there are also limitations, and not least by running it on an external server is no longer a real āprivate cloudā (ā¦). So my idea to take it back to a self-hosted solution some day kept always alive 
As a Mac user, Iām used that the machine regards oneself with user friendliness, and my motivation to deeply learning the ropes of Linux - or even running a bare metal Linux box only for one only purpose - was always and still is fairly limitedā¦ 
Back in early 2019, I took another approach, and after some investigations, I decided on a setup based on a VM - macOS host/Linux guest (for good reasons NOT on Docker!),
and after some - admittedly āmiddle-deepā - familiarization in some Linux/Webserver/Networking/SSL/Letsencrypt/DDNS/Database configuration capabilities I succeeded !
Now, Iām self-hosting my own Nextcloud instance on my Mac (Mojave) at home, connected in a āhome-typicalā way (DSL/DynDNS/Home-Router),
perfectly reachable internally AND externally from the internet by āhttps://my.domain.de/nextcloud/ā.
AND: Any Apple Devices connect to Caldav and Carddav without difficulties (despite Nextcloud is installed on a subdirectory; ./wellknown entries working appropriately).
So, if there are more interested āexoticsā around, Iāll be pleased if you encouraged me to post my installation details
(BUT: Please be aware that this still WONāT BE a plug & play thing like ājust clicking on a .dmg file and thatās it!ā
You should be willing to invest at least 3hrs+, depending on your skill level of the topics above!)
Cheers!
Renato
Hi Renato - I too have a love of the Mac Mini and was running ownCloud under MacOS Server - before it all fell apart as Apple dimantled server.
Iām having another go at getting mu Mac Mini up and running - in the interim Iāve been using a Raspberry Pi 3B+ and currently migrating to a Raspberry Pi Model 4, whilst I tinker with MacOS in the background. The environment Iām running is DietPi.
I have access - of course - to a vm such as VirtualBox on the Mac.
But curious to learn how you tackled the Mac Mini - and especially certbot / letsencrypt.
Iāme setting up with Apache and MySQL - but 10.3 of ownCloud requires a non-Apple instance of PHP 7.3 that provides and modules.
Cheers - Gary
Hi Gary,
Iāme setting up with Apache and MySQL - but 10.3 of ownCloud requires a non-Apple instance of PHP 7.3 that provides and modules.
ownCloud/Nextcloud stopped supporting OSX/macOS as a server platform for good reasons at a very early stage: There have been some strange charset behaviors and they decided not to engineer these āApple anomaliesā as there anyway have been only a few guys like you and I wanting to do such exotic stuffā¦ 
So, Iād strongly recommend you to set it up in any Linux environent as the Pi4 (I always found all older PIās as much too weak for appropriately setting up a cloud serverā¦! But the Pi4 now seems to be strong enough!) or a VM on the Mac.
I also did it that way and set up the Nextcloud environment inside an VirtualBox Linux VM on an OS X host. Including the letsencrypt stuff.
I tackled that with the help of a really cool tutorial - however it is in German what helped ME very much (Maybe you can also have some benefits from it, supported by Google Translator?? 
):
But honestly speaking, due to time limits I didnāt run this instance āproductionā so far, and meanwhile indeed it stopped working due to letsencrypt having been timed outā¦ So, I now need to find out to renew the certificate before I can go aheadā¦ (I hoped I had implemented a working automatism but obviously it doesnātā¦ 
)
And also, Iām still not completely happy with my current architecture itself - so I will need to do some further changesā¦
Many thanks for the link.
I know a little bit of German so Iāll have a look.
Given that I have the existing Mac Mini hardware, Iām keen to use it, and over the weekend I had a look at alternative options, such as running Ubuntu or CentOS on the Mac Mini hardware.
As an interim measure, I have DietPi running on Raspberry Pi Model 4 with 4GB or RAM.
āOut of the boxā itās quickly set up to run nextCloud, WordPress, Pi-Hole, RPImonitor, etc, so I have a solution in place while I search for the more exotic option.
After all, half the fun is getting things to work on hardware that it was never originally intended for ā¦
Thanks again! G535d
@jakobssystems @fy99 Good links.
Proposedly, have a look at VirtualBox for OS X hosts (i.e. Mac OS X / macOS hosts) and Debian 10 Buster. IMHO one could prefer Debian over Ubuntu in server environments. Naturally, CentOS is a valid option.
Please have in mind a server for a limited number of users may not require the most current (while expensive) CPU or the Core i7 variant. If you are lucky and have an older Mac mini you can easily upgrade the hardware and (a) should install 16 GB of RAM and (b) integrate a SSD instead of a HDD if possible. Nevertheless, even a more limited setup can provide a solution too.
See the NC System Requirements - Server in the admin documentation.
You can run DietPI on your Mac or any x86 too, not just SBC like the RPi 4.