Setting up Nextcloud using nix

Posted on September 11, 2024 by Mandla Mbuli

Nextcloud is a cool self hosted application. I finished setting it up with nix and this is how I did it. It was relatively easy when you know nix and it’s weirdness and how to find help with it.

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Ingredients

  1. Need a VPS, I use digitalocean.
  2. Point your domain to the VPS (for letsencrypt)
  3. nix, I already have it installed
  4. nixops, it has been in a migration for a while now. Last I checked they are working on version 4 but I have not seen 2 and 3 yet.

Step 1

Create the droplet. I have a script for this. It also adds a script which converts the Ubuntu to a NixOS installation.

I run the script, then wait for the nix-infect to finish.

Intermission: The nextcloud configuration

The configuration is basically just a nix configuration. I put it together from various places that I didn’t make note of. I also just looked at the nix docs a bunch. duck.ai is kinda not helpful with nix for me which is kinda dissapointing.

Step 2

Deploy using nixops

  1. Create a deployment
  2. Run the deployment
  3. Wait for the deployment to finish

Step 3

Check that everything is working fine.

That’s it. Took like 3 days to get it working though.

  • Systemd logs helped
  • permissions were wrong (wrong group actually for the keys)
  • the configuration was wrong (gateway)
  • Digitalocean can rebuild the droplet and run the infect script automatically