Easily Install OwnCloud on Your Server

OwnCloud is open-source, cross-platform software that allows us to store and synchronize files across different devices and users. Having our own OwnCloud server gives us advantages over other private storage systems. The main advantages of having a server for Owncloud include greater privacy, costs tailored to our needs, full control over information, permission customization, encryption, a web/Android/iOS client, document editing, and many others.

Create your VPS for OwnCloud

To install OwnCloud, we will need a Linux server. As for hardware requirements for a Linux server for OwnCloud, we recommend starting with:

• The latest version of Ubuntu, Debian or AlmaLinux
• 1 vCores
• 2GB of RAM
• 30GB of SSD storage

Installing OwnCloud on a Linux server

In this example, we will use Ubuntu 20.04, Apache, MariaDB and to meet OwnCloud's requirements, we will run the following commands:

# apt update && apt upgrade -y
# apt install -y apache2 libapache2-mod-php mariadb-server openssl php-imagick php-common php-curl php-gd php-imap php-intl php-json php-mbstring php-mysql php-ssh2 php-xml php-zip php-apcu php-redis redis-server wget
# apt install -y ssh bzip2 rsync curl jq inetutils-ping coreutils

# vi /etc/apache2/sites-available/owncloud.conf

<VirtualHost *:80>
 ServerName 80f8afcc-d0d9-4f91-b313-0686475d89a1.clouding.host
 DocumentRoot /var/www/owncloud
 Alias /owncloud "/var/www/owncloud/"

 <Directory /var/www/owncloud/>
  Options +FollowSymlinks
  AllowOverride All
 <IfModule mod_dav.c>
  Dav off
 </IfModule>
  SetEnv HOME /var/www/owncloud
  SetEnv HTTP_HOME /var/www/owncloud

 </Directory>
 ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error.log
 CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access.log combined
</VirtualHost>

*In ServerName, we need to specify the domain we will use to access OwnCloud. In this case, we use the VPS hostname, which you can obtain from the client panel.

We enable the new Virtualhost with the following commands:

# a2ensite owncloud.conf
# service apache2 reload

# mysql -u root -p
# CREATE DATABASE IF NOT EXISTS owncloud; 
# CREATE USER 'owncloud'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY '12345';
# GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON *.* TO 'owncloud'@'localhost' WITH GRANT OPTION;
# FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
# exit

Now that we have all the prerequisites installed, we can proceed to install OwnCloud. In this case, we will use the official OwnCloud repository:

# echo 'deb http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/isv:/ownCloud:/server:/10/Ubuntu_20.04/ /' | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/isv:ownCloud:server:10.list
# curl -fsSL https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/isv:ownCloud:server:10/Ubuntu_20.04/Release.key | gpg --dearmor | sudo tee /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/isv_ownCloud_server_10.gpg > /dev/null
# sudo apt update
# sudo apt install owncloud-complete-files

We set the correct user permissions:

# cd /var/www/
# chown -R www-data:owncloud /var/www/owncloud

Now we use the browser to access the URL http://80f8afcc-d0d9-4f91-b313-0686475d89a1.clouding.host/ that we configured in the Apache VirtualHost for OwnCloud.

To complete the installation, we will be prompted to create an administrator user and specify the path where the data will be stored:

We will also need to specify the user and database previously created for OwnCloud:

Finally, we log in with the user we created:

Once logged in, we can download the APP or start uploading files through the web browser:

To finish configuring OwnCloud, we will need to create a Cron Job, configure the cache and configure logrotate.

To create the cron job for OwnCloud, we run:

# crontab -u www-data -e 

*/15 * * * * /usr/bin/php -f /var/www/owncloud/occ system:cron

If we access Ajustes -> General in OwnCloud through the web browser, we can see that cron runs correctly:

To configure the OwnCloud cache, we will run:

# vi /var/www/owncloud/config/config.php

At the end of the file, just before the closing delimiter, we add the following lines:

 'filelocking.enabled' => true,
 'memcache.local' => '\OC\Memcache\APCu',
 'memcache.locking' => '\OC\Memcache\APCu',

# touch /etc/logrotate.d/owncloud

cat <<EOM >/etc/logrotate.d/owncloud
/var/www/owncloud/data/owncloud.log {
  size 10M
  rotate 12
  copytruncate
  missingok
  compress
  compresscmd /bin/gzip
}
EOM