Nextcloud Implementation Advice

Hello all,

I manage several Nextcloud instances—some for myself and some for others. I have two instances running on TrueNAS Scale installed as apps, and I have been quite happy with them, as updates are very simple to apply from the TrueNAS apps management page.

Additionally, I have a few Nextcloud instances running on Turnkey Linux. There seems to be a strange bug in V18.0 that prevents Nextcloud Office from working with CODE. The ISO for V17.2 works mostly, but there are still some errors in the console (in the browser). V18.0 is running PHP version 8.2.20, while V17.2 is running PHP version 8.1.17. Nextcloud and all the apps are the same across both versions. Besides being based on a different Debian versions and the different PHP version, I think they are identical. I made some effort to try a different version of PHP, but PHP and Debian are not the best of friends, and I didn’t want to go too far down the path of custom repositories.

The difficulty in maintaining this setup, combined with my experience with the mostly click-and-go instances of Nextcloud on TrueNAS, is leading me to reconsider my standard implementation of Nextcloud. While I would prefer to use TrueNAS, it has a lot of hardware requirements which don’t make much sense for smaller instances.

Now, to my question: What implementation should I use? I am looking for a stack that I can standardize on and that won’t present me with frustrating bugs that are hard to fix. Currently, I am leaning towards Nextcloud’s Docker implementation, but I don’t have much experience with Docker and I am hesitant to invest a lot of time learning it without a reasonable expectation that it will simplify my life. I run all my apps behind Nginx, so TLS support is not a concern.

What are you using, and what do you like or dislike about your setup?

You are much more experienced than the average person. It is good to get away from Truenas and Turnkey’s appstore implementations, since you know what you want.

Docker is totally fine, but is also fully supported by Truenas already. So are virtual machines. You can get started with Docker by consulting with Truenas documentation. This person’s visual guide should be a nice start: https://www.wundertech.net/how-to-use-docker-on-truenas-scale/