Symbolic Links in Nextcloud

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1

What would be the best way to handle this situation:

We’ve got two departments, both use group folders:

LAB
PRODUCTION

The lab folks manage and publish Safety Data Sheets (SDS) documents and store them in a “master” folder in their LAB group folder. (LAB->Safety Data->Master Repository->SDS)

The PRODUCTION group needs read-only access to these SDS documents.

I would like to have an SDS folder in the PRODUCTION group folder that points to the LAB group’s SDS folder.

I can share the SDS folder in LAB with the group PRODUCTION, but I don’t know where the shared folder ends up? I’d like to place it somewhere like PRODUCTION->Safety Information->SDS.

Is there a way to setup such symbolic links in Nextcloud and be able to control read/write access permissions?

2

Hi @jvantslot

If these two departments are on the same server, you can use Group Folders to do this.

https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/groupfolders

If these two departments are on different servers, you can user federated sharing.

https://docs.nextcloud.com/server/latest/admin_manual/configuration_files/federated_cloud_sharing_configuration.html

Sebastian

3

Sebstiank,

Thanks for the quick reply.

Yes both of these groups are on the same server and I’m already using group folders to compartmentalize these departments files. What I’m trying to do is to have a folder that resides in the Group Folder for LAB, be available inside the Group Folder for PRODUCTION. I’ve already shared the folder in the LAB group with the PRODUCTION Group, but I don’t know where that shared folder shows up for the PRODUCTION Group or how to place that shared folder in a particular location within the Group Folders for PRODUCTION.

I’d like for this to work similar to the way a symbolic link in Linux or a shortcut link in Windows works. So that the SDS folder in PRODUCTION is just a link to the master SDS folder in LAB.

Not sure if that is coming across clearly or not.

4

NP.

You might be able to, you can move a shared folder that has been shared with you to a different folder, on your account. but I’m not sure if this would work with 2 group folders.

You would need to do something like this,

  1. As “admin” share a folder with a “manager” user.
  2. Then as “manager”, move the location of that folder (which is now a symlink) from root folder to the second group folder.

FYI, I have not tested this, just working of my knowledge of NC.

Sebastian

5

Sebastiank,

Yeah, I tried that method. What happens is that you can move the shared folder into the PRODUCTION Group Folder, but it is no longer available in the LAB group folder.

I’ll see if I can do a feature request for this use case.

Thanks for your help though, I wanted to make sure I wasn’t missing something obvious.

1 Like
6

you can use “advanced permissions” of the group folder app. than you can assign more granular rights e.g. only read access to specific group. but I would recommend to do it on top-level or maybe first level of the folder, giving read-only access to a lower-level folder might be hard.