I’m attempting to to install nextcloud on a VPS Ubuntu server using Cloudpanel. as I was following the official Nextcloud installation doc by Cloudpanel and was required to navigate to the directory ~/tmp, I noticed that I see no directories at all in my server.
when I run ls to list the files in the home directory, it’s practically empty which doesn’t make sense because Cloudpanel is already running on the server and perfectly accessible, which means that I should be able see some files.
any advice? is it possible that I don’t have the permission to see these directories from my VPS provider?
also, when I log in to the server through terminal with the ssh command, it shows a different welcoming screen to the default one that came with the VPS. the new screen says cloudpanel it clearly is installed and running.
I briefly clicked through the demo on their website and to me it looks like you have to create a site and a corresponding user first: ( Add Site → Create PHP Site )
Once you have created the site, try SSH-in as the site-user instead of root. You may then be able to see the appropriate folders.
If that doesn’t work either, unless someone who actually uses Cloudpanel chimes in here, I’d recommend asking on their Discord or using your favourite search engine, YouTube etc. Maybe someone has written a guide to Cloudpanel or made a video on it.
thanks for the advice. just to be sure, the ash command would be newSiteUser@serverIPaddress?
tried discord and YouTube and still haven’t found answers. would you be able to recommend me an alternative approach? how do you set it up? I thought I’d go for a container manager such as cloudpanel due to my lack of experience. would you say I should do it manually instead following the official Nextcloud docs?
my reason for choosing cloudpanel is because I’d like to deploy additional software aside from Nextcloud on the VPS and I thought it would make it easier and secure. also it seems to provide SSL encryption off the bat, which is something my VPS provider charges extra for.
Yep, or at least that’s what I would guess from what I saw.
Hmm, to me it looks like it doesn’t use any containers at all. It looks more like a “classic” web hosting panel, similar to Plesk or C-Panel, i.e. you create a site and then you copy and extract a web application like Nextcloud, WordPress etc to the respective webroot.
The panel is meant to manage the dependencies like PHP, database etc and the different sites/webroots where you install the your web-applications/websites, and of course the SSL certificates for those sites, and probably a few other things via a nice webUI instead of having to use the command line. But under the hood it uses the standard system packages from Ubuntu, or whatever distribution it is installed on.
Yes, that’s exactly the purpose of these web hosting panels. So it’s more a question of how to do it with the specific panel you’re using than if it’s possible. However, I can’t help you with that, because I’d have to dive into the specifics of Cloudpanel first and learn it myself, which I’m not going to do
I have one more question I think you would be able to answer:
as I want to deploy different apps (sites) and manage them separately using cloudpanel. would you recommend me to use different site-user names?
for example: in this case, I should fill in nextcloud as a site-user. later when I deploy something like ‘anytype’ as a separate site, then the site user should be anytype right?
it has nothing to do with the login details to the app itself once it’s installed. in other words, if this site user is nextcloud, that’s only a way to access this specific site directory via SSH, but it has nothing to do with my nextcloud login details right?
what confused me in theri docs, they use somebody’s name as the nextcloud site-user… so I mistakenly thought that this is the point I configure my nextcloud log in username and password
You could probably also use multiple subdirectories within the same site/webroot, at least for applications that also use PHP, but I would recommend separating them properly by using different subdomains like cloud.yourdomain.tld, otherwebapp.yourdomian.tld etc, which will then, as it looks, lead to separate sites/webroots with separate SSH users for each subdomain.
From the instructions you linked in your original post, it doesn’t look like they provide actual install scripts for the apps they support. So yes, I’d say you have to create a site and a site user, and probably also a database and a database user for each app (unless you want to use SQlite), and then manually install the apps to the respective webroots/sites by logging in with the respective site-user. But again, that’s just what it looks like to me at first glance, I didn’t dive deep into it.
