The Nextcloud administration overview page listed a bunch of deployment
configuration warnings that needed to be addressed:
* Set the default phone region
* Define a maintenance window starting at 0600 UTC
* Increase the PHP memory limit to 1GiB
* Increase the PHP OPCache interned strings buffer size
* Increase the allowed PHP OPcache memory limit
* Fix Apache rewrite rules for /.well-known paths
The [Memories] app for Nextcloud provides a better user interface and
more features than the built-in Photos app. The latter seems to be
somewhat broken recently (timeline stops in June 2024, even though there
are more recent photos available), so we're trying out Memories (and
Recognize for facial recognition).
[Memories]: https://memories.gallery
The _nextcloud_ role originally handled setting up the PostgreSQL
database and assumed that it was running on the same server as Nextcloud
itself. I have factored out those tasks into their own role,
_nextcloud-db_, which can be applied to a separate host.
I have also introduced some new variables (`nextcloud_db_host`,
`nextcloud_db_name`, `nextcloud_db_user`, and `nextcloud_db_password`),
which can be used to specify how to connect to the database, if it is
hosted remotely. Since these variables are used by both the _nextcloud_
and _nextcloud-db_ roles, they are actually defined in a separate role,
_nextcloud-base_, upon which both depend.
Nextcloud thinks it needs to run the upgrade/migration tool if the
version number in its configuration file does not match the running
version. It then updates the config file with the correct version. The
next time the configuration policy is applied, however, the version will
revert back to whatever is set in the template. This will re-trigger
the upgrade notification.
To avoid this problem, we now set the version in the configuration file
dynamically. Nextcloud writes its version number in a constant in
`version.php`.
Nextcloud uses double backslashes in its fully-qualified path names.
Although single backslashes work, the application will replace them,
leading to a constant conflict between itself and the Ansible template.
Since the Nextcloud configuration file is managed by the configuration
policy, all of the settings configurable through the web UI need to be
templated. One important group of settings is the outbound email
configuration. This can now be configured using the `nextcloud_smtp`
Ansible variable.
Fedora now includes a packaged version of Nextcloud. This will be
_much_ easier to maintain than the tarball-based distribution method.
There are some minor differences in how the Fedora package works,
compared to the upstream tarball. Notably, it puts the configuration
file in `/etc/` and makes it read-only, and it stores persistent data
separate from the application. These differences require modifications
to the Apache and PHP-FPM configuration, but the package also included
examples to make this easier. Since the `config.php` is read-only now,
it has to be managed by the configuration policy; it cannot be modified
by the Administration web UI.
Dustin