Installation - Offline (airgapped) Nextcloud setup¶

If Nextcloud cannot be connected to the internet for e.g. security reasons, it still can be installed. The following describes the rough process.

High level steps are:

• installation of the servers from private mirrored repositories
• download Nextcloud with an internet connected computer and transfer to the server
• configure Nextcloud

Preparation of the servers¶

• Install PHP with all required modules requirements
• Install the webserver and database requirements
• Install back-end components if required (Redis, ...)
• utilities (unzip, nano, ...)

Important note: If the infrastructure is split across different servers or machines, server time should be synchronized between them (e.g., it is important to maintain synchronization between the Nextcloud server and the Talk High-performance backend). Otherwise, the system might not validate requests. To ensure proper synchronization of server time across different machines, a Network Time Protocol (NTP) server can be used. This will automatically synchronize the clocks of all servers, maintaining consistency and preventing issues. Servers also should be able to connect to each other in order to correctly run setup checks.

Download runtimes and transfer to the dedicated servers¶

• Nextcloud Enterprise download the latest version here

Optional repositories to configure¶

• For RHEL/CentOS, the EPEL repository is mandatory to install necessary dependencies to run Nextcloud.
• If required: Nextcloud Office/collabora
• If required: Nextcloud Talk High-performance backend from Struktur AG repository
• If required: (for Talk) coturn package (available on default ubuntu repo, otherwise see here

The downloaded runtimes then need to be transferred to the corresponding servers

Installation of additional apps¶

If additional apps are required, which are not part of the initial Nextcloud archive, they need to be added manually.

Additional apps should not be placed into /apps but in a dedicated /custom_apps folder. This needs to be added to the config.php app_paths.

• go to the App Store and search for the app
• at the bottom, use the link to download the latest app-version for your Nextcloud-version
• Extract the app archive and copy the files into the custom_apps folder within Nextcloud

Specific configuration of Nextcloud¶

• Maintain the parameters in the config.php
  • 'has_internet_connection' => false
  • 'updatechecker' => false
  • 'has_valid_subscription' => true

How to upgrade an offline (airgapped) installation¶

Please see this documentation on upgrading this kind of installation

If the manual efforts want to be avoided there is the possibility to block all outgoing connections but only enable dedicated domains for easier maintenance. These domains can be found here