Setting up https for someone who doesn't understand anything about the internet

ℹ️ Support 📦 Appliances (Docker, Snappy, VM, NCP, AIO)
,
1

I bought a NextBox from Nitrokey and honestly thought I would be able to “plug and play” to just save files directly to that. But instead, I need to set up Nextcloud and I have absolutely no clue what I’m doing. I have a chromebook and am trying to save everything through Nextcloud instead of through Google Drive. I truly do not understand what half of the words mean here, so I apologize in advance.

I thought I set things up correctly, and I was able to shift some files from Drive in Nextcloud as well as (sort of) get the app set up on my Nitrophone, but now it says the following on my security check:

" * Accessing site insecurely via HTTP. You are strongly advised to set up your server to require HTTPS instead, as described in the security tips :arrow_upper_right:. Without it some important web functionality like “copy to clipboard” or “service workers” will not work! "

When I go to the security check page, I don’t know what the directions mean:

"To redirect all HTTP traffic to HTTPS administrators are encouraged to issue a permanent redirect using the 301 status code. When using Apache this can be achieved by a setting such as the following in the Apache VirtualHosts configuration:

<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName cloud.nextcloud.com
Redirect permanent / https://cloud.nextcloud.com/
"

What do I do with that information? Do I copy and paste it somewhere? I am so confused.

Thank you for any clear direction you can give me, as I am totally out of my league here.

2

Hi,

You can use Nextcloud with a self signed certificate (that already comes with the Nextcloud installation. Then you will be able to use HTTPS (like the message you are seeing is mentioning) To do so, you need to enable it. The following text comes directly from the documentation:

Enabling SSL (Installation on Linux — Nextcloud latest Administration Manual latest documentation)

Note

You can use Nextcloud over plain HTTP, but we strongly encourage you to use SSL/TLS to encrypt all of your server traffic, and to protect user’s logins and data in transit.

Apache installed under Ubuntu comes already set-up with a simple self-signed certificate. All you have to do is to enable the ssl module and the default site. Open a terminal and run:

a2enmod ssl
a2ensite default-ssl
service apache2 reload

Please let us know if you can follow these instructions mentioned in the Nextcloud Documentation

3

Nitrokey Nextbox is AFAIK very customized, I would recommend to follow their docs NextBox - Nitrokey Documentation in general and specifically Managing Remote Access - Nitrokey Documentation and contact support if it doesn’t help.