I have been a user of Nextcloud for quite a few years now – I use it extensively, but certainly not to its full potential.
Nextcloud is primarily an open-source, self-hosted file sync and sharing server – think of it as an alternative to services like Dropbox or Google Drive. I use my Nextcloud mostly for storing files I might need when I’m on location teaching – it saves me having to take USB drives of my data
However, in addition to its file sharing capabilities, nextcloud also offers an almost endless suite of add-on apps, such as productivity tools including calendars, contacts, and task management, document editing capabilities, multimedia tools, games and much more. It can also be used as a collaboration utility – something akin to MS Sharepoint.
In the past I’ve run nextcloud natively on a mini HP server, then as a cloud-hosted service in AWS, but now I’ve brought it back in-house as a container-driven solution.
Configuring the docker compose file is fairly straight forward, the only thing you really need to set is the path to the location where you want to store your data in the volumes section:
Once the site is running, adding your files is really easy. There are various options you can choose, depending on whether you want to upload single files, or entire folders of content.
Sharing files with others is also really easy, and comes with some nice features, such as expiry dates, and control lists as to what others can and cannot do – such as limit the number of downloads.
You can even generate QR codes for easy sharing of your links
