Today Tech and Me provides a VM for ownCloud and has done so since 2014. The VM is very popular and is easy to install and use.
What about adding this VM as the official one for nextCloud? This would mean a new repo e.g. â/vmâ and fork my repo - rebrand it and ship it.
Input on this?
Good Idea 
âŠhas this anything to do with the owncloud/vm repository or must only enoch85/ownCloud-VM be forked?
nice thing!
But I think in the end the linux distribution should be selectable. E.g. I would prefer fedora instead of ubuntu, but other people are more satisfied with ubuntu. 
@mar1u5 What Iâm thinking is to fork enoch85/ownCloud-VM and create a new repo like nextcloud/vm.
@Ben I agree that there should be options. Up until now I made all the work myself, and as I run Ubuntu at the moment the natural thing for me has been to provide a VM based on Ubuntu. Of course there could be several options, and everyone is welcome to contribute ofc. 
You can actually just transfer the repo over to the Nextcloud Github organization, if you like 
I disagree that the OS should be selectable. We need to support these images. Iâm thinking we provide the latest CentOS and Debian releases. That should be good enough for people to determine that it runs on Fedora, for example.
OS compatibility will ideally be done in acceptance tests for all OS we support.
This image will be made for testing purposes only or will be also intended for production?
For testing purposes anything is very OK, for production this image will serve in a very similar way of a embedded system, then I think the choice should be made around something accepted as reliable/enterprise like CentOS, Debian, or FreeBSD.
Just my 2Âą.
Itâs my understanding that these images will be provided with the intent of: âhereâs a VM you can fire up and go to in a web browser!â If thatâs the case, maybe we just provide one image. This is what CheckMK does, and it works pretty well as a proof-of-concept.
https://mathias-kettner.com/check_mk_appliance_download.php?HTML=yes
They then provide packages and configuration instructions for every supported OS.
I havenât worked that much with VMs, yet. But could you explain the difference between your VM and owncloudâs VM. (Even though I believe you created both of them, right? Didnât you talk about it at the last conf?)
@jyaworski Yes, there would be more to maintain, but this is open source and everyone is welcome to contribute. I would still go the previous path and use Ubuntu. But feel free to rewrite the scripts one I publish them.
The VM contains a script that you run the first time you boot. After that everything is setup and you are good to go. ownCloud is pre-installed before you run the script ofc, but for better security I recommend to run the startup-script.
@xandcg The image is, and has always been intended for production. Now, itâs more stable stan ever and improves all the time.
@Henni Yes, you are right, I am the co-creator of the official ownCloud VM, and even before we made that I had published a VM on Tech and Meâs website. I think that was why I got the question to help out with the official one. At the 2015 conference I spoke about the development and what the VM was about.
The main difference is that my VM does more than just give you ownCloud. It installs phpmyadmin, webmin, calendar, contacts, and other useful stuff so that the end-user wonât have to do anything. Itâs all delivered as a neat package, ready (and simpler if you ask me) to use.
Also, the official VM runs with Vagrant, which Tech and Meâs VM doesnât. Ofc that would be easy to implement if the community demands/wants it. Anyway, there would be releases of the new VM for every new Nextcloud version.
Thanks for the explanation. That really sounds great for a âcommunity-oriented owncloudâ (read: ânextcloudâ)!
It seems like we all agree on this. I created the vm repo and Iâm rebranding the VM as we speak. Please continue to post your inputs on this and feel free to download it from Tech and Me and try it out. My main server is down right now becuase Iâm building a new one so please use the mirror.
Would it also be worth turning this into a Docker container? I could be wrong but wouldnât there be a greater adoption for that?
What I plan to release is a pre-made VM that you mount in VirtualBox or VMware. If someone wants to do a docker container, then feel free to do so
I second the docker container idea. However, I think we should ship both an .ova and a container so we cover all the bases.
There is already a docker container for ownCloud that is maintained by the docker community hint hint 
Then we should ask them (and all the other providers like AWS, Bitnami, SUSE Studio, âŠ) to offer an Nextcloud Appliance 
âŠbut I think they will do anyway in a few weeks
Hey @enoch85 Tried your VMs a few times and it would really be cool to have one for nextcloud.
Glad to hear that! 
I may be talking BS here, but I think worth at least for VM/contender to have, at some point, a way to update/upgrade in the same fashion of firmware updates on routers.
Indeed I think it is a better way to update/upgrade than distro packages, in a meaing Nextcloud could offer a skeleton package for the distribution, and the users then go to the browser and install/update/upgrade to the version they want.
Not all distros offer several packages versions of the same package at the same time, like i.e Gentoo does.
So always have those problems of the distro not updating the package in the proper time, or the user being âforcedâ to update when they wonât.