nextcloud/docker

What is Nextcloud?

A safe home for all your data. Access & share your files, calendars, contacts, mail & more from any device, on your terms.

⚠️⚠️⚠️ This image is maintained by community volunteers and designed for expert use. For quick and easy deployment that supports the full set of Nextcloud Hub features, use the Nextcloud All-in-One docker container maintained by Nextcloud GmbH.

Table of Contents

• What is Nextcloud?
• How to use this image
  • Getting help
  • Using the apache image
  • Using the fpm image
  • Using an external database
  • Persistent data
    • Additional volumes
    • Custom volumes
  • Running as an arbitrary user / file permissions / changing the default container user
  • Accessing the Nextcloud command-line interface (occ)
  • Viewing the Nextcloud configuration (config.php)
  • Auto configuration via environment variables
    • Database parameters
    • Initial admin account
    • Custom Data directory (datadirectory)
    • Trusted domains (trusted_domains)
    • Image specific
    • Redis Memory Caching
    • E-mail (SMTP) Configuration
    • Object Storage (Primary Storage)
    • PHP Configuration
    • Apache Configuration
    • Using the image behind a reverse proxy and specifying the server host and protocol
    • Handling Warning: /var/www/html/config/$cfgFile differs from the latest version of this image at /usr/src/nextcloud/config/$cfgFile (aka: Auto configuration and Nextcloud updates)
  • Auto configuration via hook folders
• Running this image with docker compose
  • Base version - apache
  • Base version - FPM
• Docker Secrets
• Make your Nextcloud available from the internet
  • HTTPS - SSL encryption
• First use
• Update to a newer version
• Adding Features
• Migrating an existing installation
  • Migrating from a non-Alpine image to an Alpine image
• Reporting bugs or suggesting enhancements

How to use this image

This image is designed to be used in a micro-service environment. There are two versions of the image you can choose from.

The apache tag contains a full Nextcloud installation including an apache web server. It is designed to be easy to use and gets you running pretty fast. This is also the default for the latest tag and version tags that are not further specified.

The second option is a fpm container. It is based on the php-fpm image and runs a fastCGI-Process that serves your Nextcloud page. To use this image it must be combined with any webserver that can proxy the http requests to the FastCGI-port of the container.

Getting help

Most Nextcloud Server administrative matters are covered in the official Nextcloud Admin Manual or other official Nextcloud documentation (which are all routinely updated).

If you have any problems or usage questions while using the image, please ask for assistance on the Nextcloud Community Help Forum rather than reporting them as "bugs" (unless they are bugs of course). This helps the maintainers (who are volunteers) remain focused on making the image better (rather than responding solely to one-on-one support issues). (Tip: Some of the maintainers are also regular responders to help requests on the community help forum.)

For the image specifically, we provide some simple deployment examples as well as some more extensive deployment examples. In addition, the community help forum has a "how-to" section with further examples of other peoples' container based Nextcloud stacks.

Below you'll find the main documentation for using this image.

Using the apache image

The apache image contains a webserver and exposes port 80. To start the container type:

$ docker run -d -p 8080:80 nextcloud

Now you can access Nextcloud at http://localhost:8080/ from your host system.

WARNING: This example is only suitable for limited testing purposes. Please read on to understand how the image handles storing your data and other aspects you need to consider to establish a full Nextcloud stack.

Using the fpm image

To use the fpm image, you need an additional web server, such as nginx, that can proxy http-request to the fpm-port of the container. For fpm connection this container exposes port 9000. In most cases, you might want to use another container or your host as proxy. If you use your host you can address your Nextcloud container directly on port 9000. If you use another container, make sure that you add them to the same docker network (via docker run --network <NAME> ... or a docker compose file). In both cases you don't want to map the fpm port to your host.

$ docker run -d nextcloud:fpm

As the fastCGI-Process is not capable of serving static files (style sheets, images, ...), the webserver needs access to these files. This can be achieved with the volumes-from option. You can find more information in the docker compose section.

Using an external database

By default, this container uses SQLite for data storage but the Nextcloud setup wizard (appears on first run) allows connecting to an existing MySQL/MariaDB or PostgreSQL database. You can also link a database container, e. g. --link my-mysql:mysql, and then use mysql as the database host on setup. More info is in the docker compose section.

Persistent data

The Nextcloud installation and all data beyond what lives in the database (file uploads, etc.) are stored in the unnamed docker volume volume /var/www/html. The docker daemon will store that data within the docker directory /var/lib/docker/volumes/.... That means your data is saved even if the container crashes, is stopped or deleted.

A named Docker volume or a mounted host directory should be used for upgrades and backups. To achieve this, you need one volume for your database container and one for Nextcloud.

Nextcloud:

• /var/www/html/ folder where all Nextcloud data lives

$ docker run -d \
-v nextcloud:/var/www/html \
nextcloud

Database:

• /var/lib/mysql MySQL / MariaDB Data
• /var/lib/postgresql/data PostgreSQL Data

$ docker run -d \
-v db:/var/lib/mysql \
mariadb:lts

Additional volumes

If you want to get fine grained access to your individual files, you can mount additional volumes for data, config, your theme and custom apps. The data, config files are stored in respective subfolders inside /var/www/html/. The apps are split into core apps (which are shipped with Nextcloud and you don't need to take care of) and a custom_apps folder. If you use a custom theme it would go into the themes subfolder.

Overview of the folders that can be mounted as volumes:

• /var/www/html Main folder, needed for updating
• /var/www/html/custom_apps installed / modified apps
• /var/www/html/config local configuration
• /var/www/html/data the actual data of your Nextcloud
• /var/www/html/themes/<YOUR_CUSTOM_THEME> theming/branding

If you want to use named volumes for all of these, it would look like this:

$ docker run -d \
-v nextcloud:/var/www/html \
-v custom_apps:/var/www/html/custom_apps \
-v config:/var/www/html/config \
-v data:/var/www/html/data \
-v theme:/var/www/html/themes/<YOUR_CUSTOM_THEME> \
nextcloud

If you'd prefer to use bind mounts instead of named volumes, for instance, when working with different device or network mounts for user data files and configuration:

$ docker run -d \
-v /path/on/host/to/folder/nextcloud:/var/www/html \
-v /path/on/host/to/folder/custom_apps:/var/www/html/custom_apps \
-v /path/on/host/to/folder/config:/var/www/html/config \
-v /path/on/host/to/folder/data:/var/www/html/data \
-v /path/on/host/to/folder/theme:/var/www/html/themes/<YOUR_CUSTOM_THEME> \
nextcloud

Here’s the same example using Docker's more detailed --mount. Note that with -v or --volume, the specified folders are created automatically if they don't exist. However, when using --mount for bind mounts, the directories must already exist on the host, or Docker will return an error.

$ docker run -d \
--mount type=bind,source=/path/on/host/to/folder/nextcloud,target=/var/www/html \
--mount type=bind,source=/path/on/host/to/folder/custom_apps,target=/var/www/html/custom_apps \
--mount type=bind,source=/path/on/host/to/folder/config,target=/var/www/html/config \
--mount type=bind,source=/path/on/host/to/folder/data,target=/var/www/html/data \
--mount type=bind,source=/path/on/host/to/folder/theme,target=/var/www/html/themes/<YOUR_CUSTOM_THEME> \
nextcloud

The examples above use figurative directory /path/on/host/to/folder/ for bind mounts. Please modify the paths by using either a relative or absolute path.

NOTE: Do not confuse the apps and custom_apps folders. These folders contain different sets of apps, and mixing them will result in a broken installation. The former contains "shipped" apps, which come with Nextcloud Server. The latter contains apps you install from the App Store.

Custom volumes

If mounting additional volumes under /var/www/html, you should consider:

• Confirming that upgrade.exclude contains the files and folders that should persist during installation and upgrades; or
• Mounting storage volumes to locations outside of /var/www/html.

Data inside the main folder (/var/www/html) will be overridden/removed during installation and upgrades, unless listed in upgrade.exclude. The additional volumes officially supported are already in that list, but custom volumes will need to be added by you. We suggest mounting custom storage volumes outside of /var/www/html and if possible read-only so that making this adjustment is unnecessary. If you must do so, however, you may build a custom image with a modified /upgrade.exclude file that incorporates your custom volume(s).

Running as an arbitrary user / file permissions / changing the default container user

The default user within a container is root (uid = 0). By default, processes inside the container will expect to have root privileges. Network services will drop privileges and use www-data to serve requests.

Depending on your volumes configuration, this can lead to permission issues. You can address this by running the container with a different default user. When changing the default user, the image will no longer assume it has root privileges and will run all processes under the specified uid. To accomplish this, use the --user / user option in your container environment.

See:

• https://docs.docker.com/engine/containers/run/#user
• https://github.com/docker-library/docs/tree/master/php#running-as-an-arbitrary-user
• https://docs.podman.io/en/stable/markdown/podman-run.1.html#user-u-user-group

Accessing the Nextcloud command-line interface (occ)

To use the Nextcloud command-line interface (aka. occ command):

$ docker exec -it --user www-data CONTAINER_ID php occ

or for docker compose:

$ docker compose exec --user www-data app php occ

or even shorter:

$ docker compose exec -u33 app ./occ

Note: substitute 82 for 33 if using the Alpine-based images.

Viewing the Nextcloud configuration (config.php)

The image takes advantage of Nextcloud's Multiple config.php support to inject auto configuration environment variables and set image specific config values.

This means that merely viewing your config.php will not give you an accurate view of your running config. Instead, you should use Nextcloud's occ config:list system command to get get a complete view of your merged configuration. This has the added benefit of automatically omitting sensitive values such as passwords and secrets from the output by default (e.g. useful for shared publicly or assisting others when troubleshooting or reporting a bug).

$ docker compose exec -u33 app ./occ config:list system

The --private flag can also be specified, in order to output all configuration values including passwords and secrets.

Auto configuration via environment variables

The Nextcloud image supports auto configuration of the Nextcloud Server installation via environment variables. You can preconfigure everything that would otherwise be prompted for by the Nextcloud Installation Wizard (as well as a few other key parameters relevant to initial installation).

Database parameters

To enable auto configuration, define your database connection via the following environment variables. If you set any group of values (i.e. all of MYSQL_DATABASE, MYSQL_USER, MYSQL_PASSWORD, MYSQL_HOST), they will not be requested via the Installation Wizard on first run.

You must specify all of the environment variables for a given database or the database environment variables defaults to SQLITE. ONLY use one database type!

SQLite:

• SQLITE_DATABASE Name of the database using sqlite

MYSQL/MariaDB:

• MYSQL_DATABASE Name of the database using mysql / mariadb.
• MYSQL_USER Username for the database using mysql / mariadb.
• MYSQL_PASSWORD Password for the database user using mysql / mariadb.
• MYSQL_HOST Hostname of the database server using mysql / mariadb.

PostgreSQL:

• POSTGRES_DB Name of the database using postgres.
• POSTGRES_USER Username for the database using postgres.
• POSTGRES_PASSWORD Password for the database user using postgres.
• POSTGRES_HOST Hostname of the database server using postgres.

As an alternative to passing sensitive information via environment variables, _FILE may be appended to the previously listed environment variables, causing the initialization script to load the values for those variables from files present in the container. See Docker secrets section below for details.

Initial admin account

If you specify all the variables for your database type (above), you can also auto configure your initial admin user and password (only works if you set both):

• NEXTCLOUD_ADMIN_USER Name of the Nextcloud admin user.
• NEXTCLOUD_ADMIN_PASSWORD Password for the Nextcloud admin user.

Specifying a complete database and admin credential config set at initial deployment will result in a fully automated installation (i.e. bypassing the web-based Nextcloud Installation Wizard).

Addition parameters may also be set at installation time and are described below.

Custom Data directory (datadirectory)

If you don't want to use the default data directory (datadirectory) location, you can set a custom one:

• NEXTCLOUD_DATA_DIR (default: /var/www/html/data) Configures the data directory where nextcloud stores all files from the users.

Trusted domains (trusted_domains)

One or more trusted domains can be set through environment variable, too. They will be added to the configuration after install.

• NEXTCLOUD_TRUSTED_DOMAINS (not set by default) Optional space-separated list of domains

Image specific

The install and update script is only triggered when a default command is used (apache-foreground or php-fpm). If you use a custom command you have to enable the install / update with

• NEXTCLOUD_UPDATE (default: 0)

You might want to make sure the htaccess is up to date after each container update. Especially on multiple swarm nodes as any discrepancy will make your server unusable.

• NEXTCLOUD_INIT_HTACCESS (not set by default) Set it to true to enable run occ maintenance:update:htaccess after container initialization.

Redis Memory Caching

To use Redis for memory caching as well as PHP session storage, specify the following values and also add a Redis container to your stack. See the examples for further instructions.

• REDIS_HOST (not set by default) Name of Redis container
• REDIS_HOST_PORT (default: 6379) Optional port for Redis, only use for external Redis servers that run on non-standard ports.
• REDIS_HOST_USER (not set by default) Optional username for Redis, only use for external Redis servers that require a user.
• REDIS_HOST_PASSWORD (not set by default) Redis password

Check the Nextcloud documentation for more information.

E-mail (SMTP) Configuration

To use an external SMTP server, you have to provide the connection details. Note that if you configure these values via Docker, you should not use the Nexcloud Web UI to configure external SMTP server parameters. Conversely, if you prefer to use the Web UI, do not set these variables here (because these variables will override whatever you attempt to set in the Web UI for these parameters). To configure Nextcloud to use SMTP add:

• SMTP_HOST (not set by default): The hostname of the SMTP server.
• SMTP_SECURE (empty by default): Set to ssl to use SSL, or tls to use STARTTLS.
• SMTP_PORT (default: 465 for SSL and 25 for non-secure connections): Optional port for the SMTP connection. Use 587 for an alternative port for STARTTLS.
• SMTP_AUTHTYPE (default: LOGIN): The method used for authentication. Use PLAIN if no authentication is required.
• SMTP_NAME (empty by default): The username for the authentication.
• SMTP_PASSWORD (empty by default): The password for the authentication.
• MAIL_FROM_ADDRESS (not set by default): Set the local-part for the 'from' field in the emails sent by Nextcloud.
• MAIL_DOMAIN (not set by default): Set a different domain for the emails than the domain where Nextcloud is installed.

At a minimum, the SMTP_HOST, MAIL_FROM_ADDRESS and MAIL_DOMAIN parameters must be defined.

Check the Nextcloud documentation for other values to configure SMTP.

Object Storage (Primary Storage)

By default, Nextcloud stores all files in /var/www/html/data/ (or whatever custom data directory you've configured). Nextcloud also allows the use of object storages (like OpenStack Swift or any Amazon S3-compatible implementation) as Primary Storage. This semi-replaces the default storage of files in the data directory. Note: This data directory might still be used for compatibility reasons and still needs to exist. Check the Nextcloud documentation for more information.

To use an external S3 compatible object store as primary storage, set the following variables:

• OBJECTSTORE_S3_BUCKET: The name of the bucket that Nextcloud should store the data in
• OBJECTSTORE_S3_REGION: The region that the S3 bucket resides in
• OBJECTSTORE_S3_HOST: The hostname of the object storage server
• OBJECTSTORE_S3_PORT: The port that the object storage server is being served over
• OBJECTSTORE_S3_KEY: AWS style access key
• OBJECTSTORE_S3_SECRET: AWS style secret access key
• OBJECTSTORE_S3_STORAGE_CLASS: The storage class to use when adding objects to the bucket
• OBJECTSTORE_S3_SSL (default: true): Whether or not SSL/TLS should be used to communicate with object storage server
• OBJECTSTORE_S3_USEPATH_STYLE (default: false): Not required for AWS S3
• OBJECTSTORE_S3_LEGACYAUTH (default: false): Not required for AWS S3
• OBJECTSTORE_S3_OBJECT_PREFIX (default: urn:oid:): Prefix to prepend to the fileid
• OBJECTSTORE_S3_AUTOCREATE (default: true): Create the container if it does not exist
• OBJECTSTORE_S3_SSE_C_KEY (not set by default): Base64 encoded key with a maximum length of 32 bytes for server side encryption (SSE-C)

Check the Nextcloud documentation for more information.

To use an external OpenStack Swift object store as primary storage, set the following variables:

• OBJECTSTORE_SWIFT_URL: The Swift identity (Keystone) endpoint
• OBJECTSTORE_SWIFT_AUTOCREATE (default: false): Whether or not Nextcloud should automatically create the Swift container
• OBJECTSTORE_SWIFT_USER_NAME: Swift username
• OBJECTSTORE_SWIFT_USER_PASSWORD: Swift user password
• OBJECTSTORE_SWIFT_USER_DOMAIN (default: Default): Swift user domain
• OBJECTSTORE_SWIFT_PROJECT_NAME: OpenStack project name
• OBJECTSTORE_SWIFT_PROJECT_DOMAIN (default: Default): OpenStack project domain
• OBJECTSTORE_SWIFT_SERVICE_NAME (default: swift): Swift service name
• OBJECTSTORE_SWIFT_REGION: Swift endpoint region
• OBJECTSTORE_SWIFT_CONTAINER_NAME: Swift container (bucket) that Nextcloud should store the data in

Check the Nextcloud documentation for more information.

PHP Configuration

To customize PHP limits you can change the following variables:

• PHP_MEMORY_LIMIT (default 512M) This sets the maximum amount of memory in bytes that a script is allowed to allocate. This is meant to help prevent poorly written scripts from eating up all available memory but it can prevent normal operation if set too tight.
• PHP_UPLOAD_LIMIT (default 512M) This sets the upload limit (post_max_size and upload_max_filesize) for big files. Note that you may have to change other limits depending on your client, webserver or operating system. Check the Nextcloud documentation for more information.
• PHP_OPCACHE_MEMORY_CONSUMPTION (default 128) This sets the opcache.memory_consumption value. It's the size of the shared memory storage used by OPcache, in megabytes.

Apache Configuration

To customize the Apache max file upload limit you can change the following variable:

• APACHE_BODY_LIMIT (default 1073741824 [1GiB]) This restricts the total size of the HTTP request body sent from the client. It specifies the number of bytes that are allowed in a request body. A value of 0 means unlimited.

Check the Nextcloud documentation for more information.

Using the image behind a reverse proxy and specifying the server host and protocol

By default, the apache image will replace the remote addr (IP address visible to Nextcloud) with the IP address from X-Real-IP if the request is coming from a reverse proxy in 10.0.0.0/8, 172.16.0.0/12 or 192.168.0.0/16. If you want Nextcloud to pick up the server host (HTTP_X_FORWARDED_HOST), protocol (HTTP_X_FORWARDED_PROTO) and client IP (HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR) from a trusted proxy, then disable rewrite IP and add the reverse proxy's IP address to TRUSTED_PROXIES.

• APACHE_DISABLE_REWRITE_IP (not set by default): Set to 1 to disable rewrite IP.

• TRUSTED_PROXIES (empty by default): A space-separated list of trusted proxies. CIDR notation is supported for IPv4.

If the TRUSTED_PROXIES approach does not work for you, try using fixed values for overwrite parameters.

• OVERWRITEHOST (empty by default): Set the hostname of the proxy. Can also specify a port.
• OVERWRITEPROTOCOL (empty by default): Set the protocol of the proxy, http or https.
• OVERWRITECLIURL (empty by default): Set the cli url of the proxy (e.g. https://mydnsname.example.com)
• OVERWRITEWEBROOT (empty by default): Set the absolute path of the proxy.
• OVERWRITECONDADDR (empty by default): Regex to overwrite the values dependent on the remote address.
• FORWARDED_FOR_HEADERS (empty by default): HTTP headers with the original client IP address

Check the Nexcloud documentation for more details.

Keep in mind that once set at install time, removing these environment variables later won't remove them from your config/config.php, due to how Nextcloud generates and merges the initial configuration at installation time. They can still, however, be removed manually from your config/config.php.

Handling Warning: /var/www/html/config/$cfgFile differs from the latest version of this image at /usr/src/nextcloud/config/$cfgFile (aka: Auto configuration and Nextcloud updates)

The image comes with special config files for Nextcloud that set parameters specific to containerized usage (e.g. upgrade-disable-web.config.php) or enable auto configuration via environment variables (e.g. reverse-proxy.config.php). Not keeping these files up-to-date when this warning appears may cause certain auto configuration environment variables to be ignored or the image to not work as documented or expected.

During a fresh Nextcloud installation, the latest version (from the image) of these files are copied into /var/www/html/config so that they are stored within your container's persistent storage and picked up by Nextcloud alongside your local configuration.

The copied files, however, are not automatically overwritten whenever you update your environment with a newer Nextcloud image. This is to prevent local changes in /var/www/html/config from being unexpectedly overwritten. This may lead to your image-specific configuration files becoming outdated and image functionality not matching that which is documented.

Within each image, the latest version of these config files are located in /usr/src/nextcloud/config.

A warning will be generated in the container log output when outdated image-specific configuration files are detected at startup in a running container. When you see this warning, you should manually compare (or copy) the files from /usr/src/nextcloud/config to /var/www/html/config. A command to copy these configs would e.g. be:

docker exec <container-name> sh -c "cp /usr/src/nextcloud/config/*.php /var/www/html/config"

As long as you have not modified any of the provided config files in /var/www/html/config (other than config.php) or only added new ones with names that do not conflict with the image specific ones, copying the new ones into place should be safe (but check the source path /usr/src/nextcloud/config for any newly named config files to avoid new overlaps just in case).

Auto configuration via hook folders

There are 5 hooks

• pre-installation Executed before the Nextcloud is installed/initiated
• post-installation Executed after the Nextcloud is installed/initiated
• pre-upgrade Executed before the Nextcloud is upgraded
• post-upgrade Executed after the Nextcloud is upgraded
• before-starting Executed before the Nextcloud starts

To use the hooks triggered by the entrypoint script, either

• Added your script(s) to the individual of the hook folder(s), which are located at the path /docker-entrypoint-hooks.d in the container
• Use volume(s) if you want to use script from the host system inside the container, see example.

Note: Only the script(s) located in a hook folder (not sub-folders), ending with .sh and marked as executable, will be executed.

Example: Mount using volumes

...
  app:
    image: nextcloud:stable

    volumes:
      - ./app-hooks/pre-installation:/docker-entrypoint-hooks.d/pre-installation
      - ./app-hooks/post-installation:/docker-entrypoint-hooks.d/post-installation
      - ./app-hooks/pre-upgrade:/docker-entrypoint-hooks.d/pre-upgrade
      - ./app-hooks/post-upgrade:/docker-entrypoint-hooks.d/post-upgrade
      - ./app-hooks/before-starting:/docker-entrypoint-hooks.d/before-starting
...

Running this image with docker compose

The easiest way to get a fully featured and functional setup is using a compose.yaml file. There are too many different possibilities to setup your system, so here are only some examples of what you have to look for.

At first, make sure you have chosen the right base image (fpm or apache) and added features you wanted (see below). In every case, you would want to add a database container and docker volumes to get easy access to your persistent data. When you want to have your server reachable from the internet, adding HTTPS-encryption is mandatory! See below for more information.

Base version - apache

This version will use the apache variant and add a MariaDB container. The volumes are set to keep your data persistent. This setup provides no TLS encryption and is intended to run behind a proxy.

Make sure to pass in values for MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD and MYSQL_PASSWORD variables before you run this setup.

services:
  # Note: MariaDB is external service. You can find more information about the configuration here:
  # https://hub.docker.com/_/mariadb
  db:
    # Note: Check the recommend version here: https://docs.nextcloud.com/server/latest/admin_manual/installation/system_requirements.html#server
    image: mariadb:lts
    restart: always
    command: --transaction-isolation=READ-COMMITTED
    volumes:
      - db:/var/lib/mysql
    environment:
      - MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD=
      - MYSQL_PASSWORD=
      - MYSQL_DATABASE=nextcloud
      - MYSQL_USER=nextcloud

  # Note: Redis is an external service. You can find more information about the configuration here:
  # https://hub.docker.com/_/redis
  redis:
    image: redis:alpine
    restart: always

  app:
    image: nextcloud
    restart: always
    ports:
      - 8080:80
    depends_on:
      - redis
      - db
    volumes:
      - nextcloud:/var/www/html
    environment:
      - MYSQL_PASSWORD=
      - MYSQL_DATABASE=nextcloud
      - MYSQL_USER=nextcloud
      - MYSQL_HOST=db

volumes:
  nextcloud:
  db:

Then run docker compose up -d, now you can access Nextcloud at http://localhost:8080/ from your host system.

Base version - FPM

When using the FPM image, you need another container that acts as web server on port 80 and proxies the requests to the Nextcloud container. In this example a simple nginx container is combined with the Nextcloud-fpm image and a MariaDB database container. The data is stored in docker volumes. The nginx container also needs access to static files from your Nextcloud installation. It gets access to all the volumes mounted to Nextcloud via the volumes option. The configuration for nginx is stored in the configuration file nginx.conf, that is mounted into the container. An example can be found in the examples section here.

This setup provides no TLS encryption and is intended to run behind a reverse proxy.

Make sure to pass in values for MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD and MYSQL_PASSWORD variables before you run this setup.

services:
  # Note: MariaDB is an external service. You can find more information about the configuration here:
  # https://hub.docker.com/_/mariadb
  db:
    # Note: Check the recommend version here: https://docs.nextcloud.com/server/latest/admin_manual/installation/system_requirements.html#server
    image: mariadb:lts
    restart: always
    command: --transaction-isolation=READ-COMMITTED
    volumes:
      - db:/var/lib/mysql
    environment:
      - MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD=
      - MYSQL_PASSWORD=
      - MYSQL_DATABASE=nextcloud
      - MYSQL_USER=nextcloud

  # Note: Redis is an external service. You can find more information about the configuration here:
  # https://hub.docker.com/_/redis
  redis:
    image: redis:alpine
    restart: always

  app:
    image: nextcloud:fpm
    restart: always
    depends_on:
      - redis
      - db
    volumes:
      - nextcloud:/var/www/html
    environment:
      - MYSQL_PASSWORD=
      - MYSQL_DATABASE=nextcloud
      - MYSQL_USER=nextcloud
      - MYSQL_HOST=db

  # Note: Nginx is an external service. You can find more information about the configuration here:
  # https://hub.docker.com/_/nginx/
  web:
    image: nginx:alpine-slim
    restart: always
    ports:
      - 8080:80
    depends_on:
      - app
    volumes:
      # https://docs.nextcloud.com/server/latest/admin_manual/installation/nginx.html
      - ./nginx.conf:/etc/nginx/nginx.conf:ro 
    volumes_from:
      - app

volumes:
  nextcloud:
  db:

Then run docker compose up -d, now you can access Nextcloud at http://localhost:8080/ from your host system.

Docker Secrets

As an alternative to passing sensitive information via environment variables, _FILE may be appended to some the previously listed environment variables, causing the initialization script to load the values for those variables from files present in the container. In particular, this can be used to load passwords from Docker secrets stored in /run/secrets/<secret_name> files.

Currently, this is only supported for NEXTCLOUD_ADMIN_PASSWORD, NEXTCLOUD_ADMIN_USER, MYSQL_DATABASE, MYSQL_PASSWORD, MYSQL_USER, POSTGRES_DB, POSTGRES_PASSWORD, POSTGRES_USER, REDIS_HOST_PASSWORD, SMTP_PASSWORD, OBJECTSTORE_S3_KEY, and OBJECTSTORE_S3_SECRET.

If you set any group of _FILE based values (i.e. all of MYSQL_DATABASE_FILE, MYSQL_USER_FILE, MYSQL_PASSWORD_FILE), their non-_FILE counterparts will be ignored (MYSQL_DATABASE, MYSQL_USER, MYSQL_PASSWORD).

Any files containing secrets must be readable by the UID the container is running Nextcloud as (i.e. www-data / 33).

Example:

services:
  # Note: PostgreSQL is external service. You can find more information about the configuration here:
  # https://hub.docker.com/_/postgres
  db:
    # Note: Check the recommend version here: https://docs.nextcloud.com/server/latest/admin_manual/installation/system_requirements.html#server
    image: postgres:alpine
    restart: always
    volumes:
      - db:/var/lib/postgresql/data
    environment:
      - POSTGRES_DB_FILE=/run/secrets/postgres_db
      - POSTGRES_USER_FILE=/run/secrets/postgres_user
      - POSTGRES_PASSWORD_FILE=/run/secrets/postgres_password
    secrets:
      - postgres_db
      - postgres_password
      - postgres_user
  # Note: Redis is an external service. You can find more information about the configuration here:
  # https://hub.docker.com/_/redis
  redis:
    image: redis:alpine
    restart: always

  app:
    image: nextcloud
    restart: always
    ports:
      - 8080:80
    volumes:
      - nextcloud:/var/www/html
    environment:
      - POSTGRES_HOST=db
      - POSTGRES_DB_FILE=/run/secrets/postgres_db
      - POSTGRES_USER_FILE=/run/secrets/postgres_user
      - POSTGRES_PASSWORD_FILE=/run/secrets/postgres_password
      - NEXTCLOUD_ADMIN_PASSWORD_FILE=/run/secrets/nextcloud_admin_password
      - NEXTCLOUD_ADMIN_USER_FILE=/run/secrets/nextcloud_admin_user
    depends_on:
      - redis
      - db
    secrets:
      - nextcloud_admin_password
      - nextcloud_admin_user
      - postgres_db
      - postgres_password
      - postgres_user

volumes:
  db:
  nextcloud:

secrets:
  nextcloud_admin_password:
    file: ./nextcloud_admin_password.txt # put admin password in this file
  nextcloud_admin_user:
    file: ./nextcloud_admin_user.txt # put admin username in this file
  postgres_db:
    file: ./postgres_db.txt # put postgresql db name in this file
  postgres_password:
    file: ./postgres_password.txt # put postgresql password in this file
  postgres_user:
    file: ./postgres_user.txt # put postgresql username in this file

Make your Nextcloud available from the internet

Until here, your Nextcloud is just available from your docker host. If you want your Nextcloud available from the internet adding SSL encryption is mandatory.

HTTPS - SSL encryption

There are many different possibilities to introduce encryption depending on your setup.

We recommend using a reverse proxy in front of your Nextcloud installation. Your Nextcloud will only be reachable through the proxy, which encrypts all traffic to the clients. You can mount your manually generated certificates to the proxy or use a fully automated solution which generates and renews the certificates for you.

In our examples section we have an example for a fully automated setup using a reverse proxy, a container for Let's Encrypt certificate handling, database and Nextcloud. It uses the popular nginx-proxy and acme-companion containers. Please check the according documentations before using this setup.

First use

When you first access your Nextcloud, the setup wizard will appear and ask you to choose an administrator account username, password and the database connection (unless of course you've provided all the necessary auto-config config values ahead of time).

For the database use db as host and nextcloud as table and user name. Also enter the password you chose in your compose.yaml file.

Update to a newer version

Updating the Nextcloud container is done by pulling the new image, throwing away the old container and starting the new one.

It is only possible to upgrade one major version at a time. For example, if you want to upgrade from version 14 to 16, you will have to upgrade from version 14 to 15, then from 15 to 16.

Since all data is stored in volumes, nothing gets lost. The startup script will check for the version in your volume and the installed docker version. If it finds a mismatch, it automatically starts the upgrade process. Don't forget to add all the volumes to your new container, so it works as expected.

$ docker pull nextcloud
$ docker stop <your_nextcloud_container>
$ docker rm <your_nextcloud_container>
$ docker run <OPTIONS> -d nextcloud

Beware that you have to run the same command with the options that you used to initially start your Nextcloud. That includes volumes, port mapping.

When using docker compose your compose file takes care of your configuration, so you just have to run:

$ docker compose pull
$ docker compose up -d

Adding Features

A lot of people want to use additional functionality inside their Nextcloud installation. If the image does not include the packages you need, you can easily build your own image on top of it. Start your derived image with the FROM statement and add whatever you like.

FROM nextcloud:apache

RUN ...

The examples folder gives a few examples on how to add certain functionalities, like including the cron job, smb-support or imap-authentication.

If you use your own Dockerfile, you need to configure your docker compose file accordingly. Switch out the image option with build. You have to specify the path to your Dockerfile. (in the example it's in the same directory next to the compose.yaml file)

  app:
    build: .
    restart: always
    depends_on:
      - db
    volumes:
      - data:/var/www/html/data
      - config:/var/www/html/config
      - apps:/var/www/html/apps

If you intend to use another command to run the image, make sure that you set NEXTCLOUD_UPDATE=1 in your Dockerfile. Otherwise the installation and update will not work.

FROM nextcloud:apache

...

ENV NEXTCLOUD_UPDATE=1

CMD ["/usr/bin/supervisord"]

Updating your own derived image is also very simple. When a new version of the Nextcloud image is available run:

docker build -t your-name --pull .
docker run -d your-name

or for docker compose:

docker compose build --pull
docker compose up -d

The --pull option tells docker to look for new versions of the base image. Then the build instructions inside your Dockerfile are run on top of the new image.

Migrating an existing installation

You're already using Nextcloud and want to switch to docker? Great! Here are some things to look out for:

1. Define your whole Nextcloud infrastructure in a compose.yaml file and run it with docker compose up -d to get the base installation, volumes and database. Work from there.
2. Restore your database from a mysqldump (db is the name of your database container / service name)
   • To import from a MySQL dump use the following commands

   docker compose cp ./database.dmp db:/dmp
   docker compose exec db sh -c "mysql --user USER --password PASSWORD nextcloud < /dmp"
   docker compose exec db rm /dmp
   

   • To import from a PostgreSQL dump use to following commands

   docker compose cp ./database.dmp db:/dmp
   docker compose exec db sh -c "psql -U USER --set ON_ERROR_STOP=on nextcloud < /dmp"
   docker compose exec db rm /dmp
   

3. Edit your config.php
4. Edit your config.php
   1. Set database connection
      • In case of MySQL database

      'dbhost' => 'db:3306',
      

      • In case of PostgreSQL database

      'dbhost' => 'db:5432',
      

   2. Replace any existing apps_paths configuration with the following Docker-compatible version. Your existing configuration may look different (e.g. using OC::$SERVERROOT.'/apps' or having only a single entry), but it must be replaced with exactly this to ensure shipped apps in apps are non-writable and user-installed apps go to custom_apps:

      'apps_paths' => array (
        0 => array (
          'path' => '/var/www/html/apps',
          'url' => '/apps',
          'writable' => false,
        ),
        1 => array (
          'path' => '/var/www/html/custom_apps',
          'url' => '/custom_apps',
          'writable' => true,
        ),
      ),
      

   3. Make sure your data directory is set to /var/www/html/data

      'datadirectory' => '/var/www/html/data',
      

5. Copy your data (app is the name of your Nextcloud container / service name):

   docker compose cp ./data/ app:/var/www/html/
   docker compose exec app chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/html/data
   docker compose cp ./theming/ app:/var/www/html/
   docker compose exec app chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/html/theming
   docker compose cp ./config/config.php app:/var/www/html/config
   docker compose exec app chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/html/config
   

   If you want to preserve the metadata of your files like timestamps, copy the data directly on the host to the named volume using plain cp like this:

   cp --preserve --recursive ./data/ /path/to/nextcloudVolume/data
   

6. Copy only the custom apps you use (or simply redownload them from the web interface):

   docker compose cp ./custom_apps/ app:/var/www/html/
   docker compose exec app chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/html/custom_apps
   

Migrating from a non-Alpine image to an Alpine image

If you already use one of our non-Alpine images, but want to switch to an Alpine-based image, you may experience permissions problems with your existing volumes. This is because the Alpine images uses a different user ID for www-data. So, you must change the ownership of the /var/www/html (or $NEXTCLOUD_DATA_DIR) folder to be compatible with Alpine:

docker exec container-name chown -R www-data:root /var/www/html

After changing the permissions, restart the container and the permission errors should disappear.

Reporting bugs or suggesting enhancements

If you believe you've found a bug in the image itself (or have an enhancement idea specific to the image), please search for already reported bugs and enhancement ideas.

If there is a relevant existing open issue, you can either add to the discussion there or upvote it to indicate you're impacted by (or interested in) the same issue.

If you believe you've found a new bug, please create a new Issue so that others can try to reproduce it and remediation can be tracked.

If you have any problems or usage questions while using the image, please ask for assistance on the Nextcloud Community Help Forum rather than reporting them as "bugs" (unless they really are bugs of course). This helps the maintainers (who are volunteers) remain focused on making the image better (rather than responding solely to one-on-one support issues). (Tip: Some of the maintainers are also regular responders to help requests on the Nextcloud Community Help Forum.)

Most Nextcloud Server matters are covered in the official Nextcloud Admin Manual or the other official Nextcloud documentation (which are routinely updated).