nextcloud on Debian Stretch/Jessie with Lets Encrypt SSL, nginx, MySQL, php7 (among others also for Raspberry Pi)

⇨ Update January 2018: Updated for nextcloud 13 ⇦

In this tutorial I describe how to install nextCloud (the modern successor of Owncloud) on a fresh Debian Stretch (Debian 9) or Debian Jessie (Debian 8). I use nginx as web server, MySQL and php7. Why nginx and php7? These software packages are designed for high performance and are actively maintained by the developers. In addition, we secure our web server with a free SSL certificate from Lets Encrypt and configure nginx so that it only uses current security settings and also activate HTTP/2. This gives us a modern, secure and fast setup that is perfectly suited for nextCloud.

These instructions can also be used for a Raspberry Pi.

Requirements
As a basis, I assume a freshly installed Debian 8 Jessie, to which the domain you want to use already points.

Basic work
When I start a new server, the first thing I do is to create a nice prompt, which makes working more fun. I have already described this here. If you don't want to do this, you can simply skip this step.

Next I will make sure that the system is up to date.

apt-get update && apt-get upgrade && apt-get dist-upgrade

Depending on which text editor you want to work with, it must now be installed, in my case this is vim:

apt-get install vim-nox

Now we set up the package sources. Under Debian, it is best to use dotdeb.org, as all the required packages are available there in an up-to-date version. The integration of these is described here, but can also be summarised very briefly like this:

The following two lines must be added to the /etc/apt/sources.list file:

deb http://packages.dotdeb.org jessie all
deb-src http://packages.dotdeb.org jessie all

After that, the key of the new package source must be imported into our system. We can load the key with

wget https://www.dotdeb.org/dotdeb.gpg

And play in with

apt-key add dotdeb.gpg

Lets Encrypt
Now we take care of the free SSL certificate. This is easiest to apply for with **certbot**, but we have to activate the backports in our package sources. To do this, we need to add the following line to the /etc/apt/sources.list file:

deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian jessie-backports main

Now we need to re-read the package sources

apt-get update

And then certbot can be installed

apt-get install certbot -t jessie-backports

For the next step, it is absolutely necessary that a domain already points to the server. Because now we apply for the SSL certificate from Let's Encrypt:

certbot certonly

This command guides you through the certificate application process. A mail address and the corresponding domain must be entered. If everything has worked, certbot exits with a success message.

PHP7

PHP7 can be installed quite quickly. To do this, we simply execute the following command:

apt-get install php7.0-fpm php7.0-gd php7.0-mysql php7.0-curl php7.0-xml php7.0-zip php7.0-intl php7.0-mcrypt php7.0-mbstring php7.0-bz2

This will install php7 with all the necessary extensions.

NGINX

The installation of nginx is initiated with the following command:

apt-get install nginx

Next, we need to configure nginx. It is important to us that our web server only uses the latest security algorithms, so we need to create a Diffie-Hellman key beforehand:

mkdir -p /etc/ssl/private
chmod 710 /etc/ssl/private
cd /etc/ssl/private
openssl dhparam -out dhparams.pem 2048
chmod 600 dhparams.pem

Now for the actual configuration of nginx. To do this, we open the following file and replace the content completely: /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default
The new file content: Link (where "your.cloud" must be replaced by your domain)

Once the file has been adapted accordingly, nginx can be restarted:

/etc/init.d/nginx restart

Under your domain, nextcloud should now already be accessible. However, we still need to install MySQL first, as we need a database for nextcloud.

MYSQL

MySQL is installed with the following command. During the installation you will be asked for the root password which you should remember!

apt-get install mysql-server mysql-client

Next we secure the MySQL installation

mysql_secure_installation

Now we need our own database user and database for our Nextcloud installation.

To do this, we log in as root with the password assigned during installation:

mysql -u root -p

To create our own database called "nextclouddb" we use the following command

create database nextclouddb;

Then we create a user that we call "nextclouduser". Important! We have to replace "password" with a new password.

create user 'nextclouduser'@'localhost' identified by 'password';

Finally, the user just created needs permissions to the database just created. Here, too, we need to replace the password.

grant all on nextclouddb.* to 'nextclouduser' identified by 'password';

Now we have set up the database and can close the MySQL client.

exit

Now the actual Nextcloud installation

We are almost finished. All that remains is to install nextcloud. To do this, we download the current version of Nextcloud into our web server directory.

wget https://download.nextcloud.com/server/releases/nextcloud-13.0.0.zip

unzip nextcloud-13.0.0-zip

Copy the files into the web directory and we can start the installation in the web browser.