Obtaining and installing

We want to see a variety of installation types suitable for different scenarios.

We used the (still maintained) 10.x version of OwnCloud because we felt the rewrite, called Infinite Scale, hasn’t caught up in terms of the ecosystem of compatible apps yet. Because 10.x is tied to PHP 7, rather than PHP 8, it can be a difficult manual install, so we installed the Docker version. The website offers a full range of distribution-orientated packages and VM images for most virtualisers as well as Docker images, but there was no mention of a Raspberry Pi version on the download page (however, it can be installed unofficially).

Nextcloud offers an installer script that can be used if you already have a full LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) server installed and configured, and there is a ready-made VirtualBox image and an official Docker image. We decided to install via Snap, an easy option for Ubuntu users that works on the Raspberry Pi, too. Although easy to set up, Snap has the slight downside that you have to do a bit of searching around to find the location of storage and configuration resources.

Pydio Cells ships as a self-contained binary with a built-in web server. The installation options are well documented and include appliances and virtual images such as Docker, VMWare and a universal OVF image along with full Raspberry Pi documentation. We chose to install manually. This did require a manual installation of MariaDB database that was on about the same level as a WordPress manual installation in difficulty. Overall, most of the installation options were straightforward .

Seafile offers a Docker image, which is the option we chose. This means installing Docker Compose into Ubuntu, downloading a YAML script, making a few alterations, and then running a command. Overall, it was a simple job. There were also options for a partially automated manual install or instructions for a completely manual installation, which would leave you with a fairly traditional setup based around MariaDB and Nginx/Apache.

Filestash only provides instructions for a Docker installation, which consists of downloading a YAML configuration file, making changes to it, then running the Docker Compose command. It’s one of the easier installations here but also the least flexible.

With Pydio Cells, you can download it, set up the MySQL database and then run the executable from the command line, although the free and enterprise versions do differ.