Nextcloud, AppAPI and FreeBSD

🏷️ General
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I have no support/technical question and have seen the support category. (Be aware that direct support questions will be deleted.)

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Which general topic do you have

Just sharing thoughts. NC 32 is amazing and modularization is awesome. NC seemingly has adopted the docker-first approach with AppAPI. I feel like this may exclude non-Linux OSes a bit more.

I know FreeBSD is not a supported OS. I understand NC doesn’t have the resources to support all OSes.

All that said:

  1. NC is definitely used on BSDs; There is an official FreeBSD pkg for NC; People also install from the zip archive. Maybe NC folks have the statistics?
  2. BSD folks can still run docker in a remote host, like in a VM. Which is a great solution.
  3. A possible even more open solution to decouple deployment from NC maybe, similar to Gitlab runners: NC would only speaks with apps, not the superviser/orchestrator (the deployment daemon).
  4. Maybe a viable path forward is for the community to come up with deployment schemes (app_api + docker-socket-proxy) that enable other virtualization backends?

Apologies if I missed important context, I just learned about AppAPI migrating to NC32.

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I just discovered “AppApi Deamon” in the 32.0 version and I am, to say the least, very concerned about the direction plugin development is taking.

I’m also running Nextcloud on FreeBSD (what else), Nextcloud is just a big PHP application that connects to an SQL database so, in theory, I could run this on a toaster on NetBSD if I wanted to. I’m just downloading the .tar.bz archive to upgrade it and it works.

Does this mean that PHP plugins will eventually be abandoned and that developers will have to package their plugins using Docker ?

Like a Docker instance for a simple 2FA plugin ?

I have no intention of booting another Linux machine in parallel to run 1 note-taking plugins. Ressources and electricity are expensive.

By the way, I don’t need AI to store my files.

This software is becoming a real operating system in its own right.

I’ve been using Nextcloud for over 10 years on FreeBSD, and I feel the winds of migration blowing stronger and stronger towards another solution. This software is becoming a real mess, bloated with superfluous stuff.

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The app-api is if you want to run plugins with other programming languages and environments. For standard app, you would make the whole setup much more complicated, and I am not sure about the benefits.

I haven’t gone through all the details, but if it is just a specially set up reverse proxy to establish the connection between Nextcloud and the app-containers, I don’t see why this should not work in a FreeBSD-jail or something similar, the code should be public. Docker is just easy to tell people to install and run a specific container.

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