| Key | Value |
|---|---|
| Summary | Learn how to deploy Nextcloud and Collabora Online on Ubuntu server, all backed by HTTPS using Let’s Encrypt |
| Categories | deploy-applications |
| Difficulty | 2 |
| Author | Tim McNamara tsm@canonical.com |
Introduction
Duration: 0:20
Nextcloud provides file hosting and several collaboration tools, like contacts, calendars and task boards.
The Collabora Online plugin allows for online collaborative document editing within the Nextcloud.
They’re easy to deploy and manage with Juju. Juju makes it practical to host a personal cloud.
Requirements
To make your way through this tutorial, you will need:
- Juju installed (see Installing Juju)
- a domain name that you control
Testing install
Open up a terminal prompt and run the juju version command. If it reports a version, carry on. If not, retry the install steps.
$ juju version
2.7.5
What to do if you get stuck: The best place to ask for help is the Juju Discourse forum. If you prefer chatting, visit us on IRC or Matrix.
Establishing a Juju controller
Duration: 5:00
We require a Juju controller. You have two options:
-
Use the hosted JAAS controller (recommended for using Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Compute Platform)
-
Otherwise use the bootstrap process to create a controller yourself
What is a Juju controller?: Juju uses a software agent called “the controller” to apply changes that you make and to monitor the system’s health. Read more about Juju controllers.
Using the hosted JAAS controller
The Juju team provide a controller that can interact with Juju models hosted on public clouds.
$ juju login jaas
Using JAAS keeps costs down. It hosts the Juju controller for you such that you are only responsible for hosting your application(s).
Bootstrap process
To bootstrap Juju onto your own hardware, we need to register your hardware first. We will collect each machine into a “cloud”.
Once the cloud is available, we’ll be able to create a controller into it.
Using your own computer hardware
(Skip this step if you are planning to deploy to public clouds)
If you have your own server hardware, you can make use of the manual cloud to register your computers with Juju.
The juju add-cloud command allows you to complete the registration process. It takes you through an interactive prompt where you will be asked to give a name to your cloud and SSH login details (user@10.10.10.100 in this example)
$ juju add-cloud
Cloud Types
lxd
maas
manual
openstack
vsphere
Select cloud type: manual
Enter a name for your manual cloud: home
Enter the controller's hostname or IP address: user@10.10.10.100
Cloud "home" successfully added
You may bootstrap with 'juju bootstrap home'
Create a controller
Use the juju bootstrap command to create the controller. Add the name of the cloud you wish to deploy to as an argument.
$ juju bootstrap home
The juju bootstrap command takes many options. Follow Getting Started with Juju for detailed instructions.
Which clouds does Juju support?:
Use the juju clouds command to list the clouds that Juju knows about.
Creating a model
Duration: 0:30
A model is a workspace for our applications. It houses machines and applications.
Complex models also include other components like networking spaces and persistent storage volumes.
$ juju add-model privcloud
Added 'privcloud' model on aws/us-west-1 with credential '<credential>' for user `<user>`
Adding machines
Duration: 5:00
We now need to add machines to our model. How to do this is subtly different depending on the type of cloud that we are using.
Need to add many machines?
Outside of the home or small office environment, your hardware will be more complex. For multi-server contexts we recommend installing MAAS and then configuring a MAAS cloud.
We want to be conservative with our compute resources, so we’ll add a large machine manually, then deploy Nextcloud and the backing database to that single machine.
On a public cloud
Juju can provision machines on our behalf:
juju add-machine --constraints="mem=8G root-disk=200G"
created machine 0
On a manual cloud
We re-register the machine that’s hosting the controller as a machine that’s hosting the model.
$ juju add-machine sssh:user@10.10.10.100
created machine 0
We’ll also add a small xenial (14.04) instance to manage the ssl-termination-proxy charm. This will live as a container within machine 0.
$ juju add-machine lxd:0 --constraints="mem=256M"
created container 0/lxd/0
Deploy Nextcloud and PostgreSQL
Duration: 2:30
If you would like a “1-click” install, you can use this command to deploy everything together. By default, it will use several machines rather than making use of containers on the host:
juju deploy cs:~erik-lonroth/bundle/nextcloud-collabora-tls
$ juju deploy cs:~erik-lonroth/nextcloud --to 0
Located charm "cs:~erik-lonroth/nextcloud-3".
Deploying charm "cs:~erik-lonroth/nextcloud-3".
Nextcloud requires a database. We’ll install PostgreSQL. We’ll allocate 120 GB of storage space.
$ juju deploy postgresql --storage pgdata=120G --to 0
Located charm "cs:postgresql-203".
Deploying charm "cs:postgresql-203".
Multi-tenant applications:
PostgreSQL and Nextcloud are co-located on the same machine. To change this, we can add another unit of Nextcloud, then remove the nextcloud/0 unit. Juju provides us with the ability to start small and scale up as needed.
If you consult the juju status output, you’ll notice an angry red “blocked” message in two places:
$ juju status
Model Controller Cloud/Region Version SLA Timestamp
privcloud jaas aws/us-west-1 2.6.10 unsupported 15:31:23+13:00
App Version Status Scale Charm Store Rev OS Notes
nextcloud blocked 1 nextcloud jujucharms 3 ubuntu
postgresql 10.10 active 1 postgresql jujucharms 199 ubuntu
Unit Workload Agent Machine Public address Ports Message
nextcloud/0* blocked idle 0 52.53.172.164 80/tcp Need Mysql or Postgres relation to continue
postgresql/0* active executing 0 52.53.172.164 5432/tcp (start) Live master (10.10)
Machine State DNS Inst id Series AZ Message
0 started 52.53.172.164 i-0d1e5b3a3de5eb4ca bionic us-west-1c running
To fix this, we need to get the two applications to talk together.
$ juju relate nextcloud postgresql:db
It may take a minute or two for the system to re-configure itself, but juju status will soon update itself to look more like this:
$ juju status
Model Controller Cloud/Region Version SLA Timestamp
privcloud jaas aws/us-west-1 2.6.10 unsupported 15:35:07+13:00
App Version Status Scale Charm Store Rev OS Notes
nextcloud active 1 nextcloud jujucharms 3 ubuntu
postgresql 10.10 active 1 postgresql jujucharms 199 ubuntu
Unit Workload Agent Machine Public address Ports Message
nextcloud/0* active idle 0 52.53.172.164 80/tcp Ready
postgresql/0* active idle 0 52.53.172.164 5432/tcp Live master (10.10)
Machine State DNS Inst id Series AZ Message
0 started 52.53.172.164 i-0d1e5b3a3de5eb4ca bionic us-west-1c running
Accessing the Nextcloud login page
Duration: 1:30
Nextcloud is now fully operational. But accessing machine 0’s public IP address (52.53.172.164) on port 80 won’t yet show you a web page. We need to inform Juju to open the firewall.
juju expose nextcloud
If we visit the IP address now, we’re presented with a login screen (and some security warnings).
But what are the login details we should type in?
Accessing the initial log in details for Nextcloud
Juju has created an admin account on our behalf using configuration parameters available in the charm.
We can access them via the juju config commands:
$ juju config nextcloud admin-username
admin
$ juju config nextcloud admin-password
mypassword
Entering these values into the form should present you with the Nextcloud application. Take this opportunity to change the admin account’s password and create a non-admin user account.
Note:
It is possible to set your own admin password at deployment time via the --config option. The only reason we didn’t do it at that point was in order to keep things simple.
Adding HTTPS
Duration: 5:00
You now need to add a DNS record to a domain for Nextcloud. We’ll assume cloud.example.com. The A record needs to point to the IP address of the machine hosting the ssl-termination-proxy/0 unit.
An easy way to fetch the relevant IP address is to use the filtering and formatting options of the juju status command:
juju status ssl-termination-proxy/0 --format=line
This yields:
- ssl-termination-proxy/0: 54.215.139.236 (agent:idle, workload:active) 80/tcp, 443/tcp
With this information in hand, we can add the equivalent DNS entry:
cloud A 54.215.139.236 3600
Now, to set the config options for the relevant applications, we need to open the proxy to the Internet and add a relation between the ssl-termination-proxy and nextcloud-fqdn.
juju config nextcloud fqdn=cloud.example.com
juju config nextcloud-fqdn fqdns=cloud.example.com
juju expose ssl-termination-proxy
juju relate ssl-termination-proxy nextcloud-fqdn:ssl-termination
After a minute or so, juju status output will converge to something that looks like this:
$ juju status
Model Controller Cloud/Region Version SLA Timestamp
privcloud jaas aws/us-west-1 2.6.8 unsupported 16:14:23+13:00
App Version Status Scale Charm Store Rev OS Notes
nextcloud 16.0.1.1 active 1 nextcloud jujucharms 3 ubuntu exposed
nextcloud-fqdn active 1 ssl-termination-fqdn jujucharms 5 ubuntu
postgresql 10.10 active 1 postgresql jujucharms 199 ubuntu
ssl-termination-proxy active 1 ssl-termination-proxy jujucharms 15 ubuntu exposed
Unit Workload Agent Machine Public address Ports Message
nextcloud/0* active idle 0 52.53.172.164 80/tcp Nextcloud is OK.
postgresql/0* active idle 0 52.53.172.164 5432/tcp Live master (10.10)
ssl-termination-proxy/0* active idle 1 54.215.139.236 80/tcp,443/tcp Ready (cloud.example.com)
nextcloud-fqdn/0* active idle 54.215.139.236 Ready
Machine State DNS Inst id Series AZ Message
0 started 52.53.172.164 i-0d1e5b3a3de5eb4ca bionic us-west-1c running
1 started 54.215.139.236 i-03d027ce3a8f9fc2e xenial us-west-1b running
If you now access the page, you might be surprised at what you encounter:
Okay. The security warnings from the browser have gone, but a new one from Nextcloud has popped up. But that’s okay. We can use juju ssh to make the recommended setting change.
Alter the Nextcloud trusted_domains setting
We now need to tweak some settings within our Nextcloud instance to allow it to understand HTTPS.
The Nextcloud charm that we’ve deployed supports an action that does this—add-trusted-domain. Make sure to include the domain and index parameters.
$ juju run-action nextcloud/0 add-trusted-domain --wait domain="localhost" index=1
Action queued with id: <id>
Alter the Nextcloud trusted_domains setting manually
If you want to know what’s happening under the hood, you can also perform this step yourself:
Access the remote shell securely
Juju provides a helper command that understands how to connect to units directly without needing to refer back to their IP addresses:
juju ssh nextcloud/0
Now, we need to find where the application is stored. We will look for it using the find command.
sudo find / -name 'config.sample.php' 2>/dev/null
/var/www/nextcloud/config/config.sample.php
Let’s look inside that directory:
ls /var/www/nextcloud/config/
CAN_INSTALL config.php config.sample.php
Great. config.php definitely looks like what we want. Let’s first make a backup.
cd /var/www/nextcloud/config/
sudo cp config.php config.backup.php
Now we can use our favourite editor to edit that file.
sudo nano config.php
Edit the ‘trusted_domains’ line so that it includes your domain name:
<?php
$CONFIG = array (
// ...
'trusted_domains' => array ('cloud.example.com'),
// ...
);
Save the file.
Access Nextcloud over HTTPS
Duration: 0:10
Visiting your domain name with your browser should present you with a login page with no security warnings:
Deploying Collabora
Duration: 5:00
The steps in this section should go faster, as they mostly duplicate the steps we already took for Nextcloud. Essentially we begin by deploying:
juju deploy cs:~erik-lonroth/collabora --config nextcloud_domain=cloud.example.com
juju deploy cs:~tengu-team/ssl-termination-fqdn collabora-fqdn --config fqdns=docs.example.com
While that is deploying, add a DNS record for your Collabora. Here is an example:
docs A 54.215.139.236 3600
Now, add the relations. After they’re added, your applications will automatically configure themselves.
juju relate collabora:website collabora-fqdn:website
juju relate collabora-fqdn:ssl-termination ssl-termination-proxy:ssl-termination
Install the Collabora Online plugin for Nextcloud
Duration: 3:00
This step requires you to adjust a setting within Nextcloud’s Administration menu.
Appendix: All steps as a single script
Juju is asynchronous and declarative. The commands in this tutorial can be executed in any order and will be resolved by Juju. Here they are as a single script that you can customise (be sure to update the configuration values):
juju deploy cs:~erik-lonroth/nextcloud
juju deploy cs:~erik-lonroth/collabora
juju deploy postgresql --storage pgdata=100G
juju deploy cs:~tengu-team/ssl-termination-proxy
juju deploy cs:~tengu-team/ssl-termination-fqdn collabora-fqdn
juju deploy cs:~tengu-team/ssl-termination-fqdn nextcloud-fqdn
# database configuration
juju relate postgresql:db nextcloud:postgres
# nextcloud configuration
juju relate nextcloud:website nextcloud-fqdn:website
juju relate nextcloud-fqdn:ssl-termination ssl-termination-proxy:ssl-termination
juju config nextcloud fqdn=cloud.example.com
# collabora configuration
juju relate collabora:website collabora-fqdn:website
juju relate collabora-fqdn:ssl-termination ssl-termination-proxy:ssl-termination
juju config collabora nextcloud_domain=cloud.example.com
juju config collabora-fqdn fqdns=docs.example.com
# networking
juju expose ssl-termination-proxy
Acknowledgements
Juju community member @erik-lonroth built the nextcloud and collabora charms to enable this.
The Tengu team, led by @merlijn-sebrechts, provided the Let’s Encrypt support.
