Getting started

Tutorial

You can find a step-by-step tutorial on how to use this setup in the Nextcloud Developer Portal. It will guide you through the setup and show you how to use it for app development.

There are two ways of using this setup. A persistent setup is the most common one where you have a local git clone of all required repositories. The other one is a standalone setup that can be used to quickly run parts of the Nextcloud ecosystem source code without having to clone everything.

Persistent development setup

Note

This is the recommended way to run the setup for development. You will have a local clone of all required source code.

To start the setup run the following commands to clone the repository and bootstrap the setup. This will prepare your setup and clone the Nextcloud server repository and required apps into the workspace folder.

git clone https://github.com/juliusknorr/nextcloud-docker-dev
cd nextcloud-docker-dev
./bootstrap.sh

There are some options to simplify the later development by cloning not only the minimal data set but a bigger one that helps with later switching of branches etc. See also the detailed page for an overview of the options.

This may take some time depending on your internet connection speed.

Depending on your docker version you will need to use docker-compose instead of docker compose in the following commands.

Once done you can start the Nextcloud container using:

docker compose up nextcloud

You can also start it in the background using docker compose up -d nextcloud.

You can then access your Nextcloud instance at http://nextcloud.local. The default username is admin and the password is admin. Other users can be found in the documentation.

Warning

Note that for performance reasons the server repository might have been cloned with --depth=1 by default. To get the full history it is highly recommended to run:

cd workspace/server
git fetch --unshallow
git config remote.origin.fetch "+refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*"
git fetch origin

Standalone containers

Note

This is a very simple way but doesn't cover all features. If you are looking for a fully featured setup you may skip to the next section

There is a standalone version of the Nextcloud containers available that can be used to run Nextcloud without the other services. This is useful if you are just wanting to get started with app development against a specific server version, or to just have a quick way to develop, test or debug.

These containers support automatic fetching of the server source code and use SQLite as the database. The server source code is fetched from the official Nextcloud server repository and the version can be specified using the NEXTCLOUD_VERSION environment variable. The default version is master.

Running the containers does not need this repository to be cloned.

Example for running a Nextcloud server from the master branch of server:

docker run --rm -p 8080:80 ghcr.io/juliusknorr/nextcloud-dev-php80:latest

For app development you can mount your app directly into the container:

docker run --rm -p 8080:80 -v ~/path/to/appid:/var/www/html/apps-extra/appid ghcr.io/juliusknorr/nextcloud-dev-php80:latest

The SERVER_BRANCH environment variable can be used to run different versions of Nextcloud by specifying either a server branch or git tag.

docker run --rm -p 8080:80 -e SERVER_BRANCH=v24.0.1 ghcr.io/juliusknorr/nextcloud-dev-php80:latest

You can also mount your local server source code into the container to run a local version of Nextcloud:

docker run --rm -p 8080:80 -e SERVER_BRANCH=v24.0.1 -v /tmp/server:/var/www/html ghcr.io/juliusknorr/nextcloud-dev-php80:latest