After my classes using my Raspberry Pi for many handy projects, I decided to now use it as a Nextcloud server, and I might try and set it up for other things as well
So, as I previously stated, I am very happy I got to have a Raspberry Pi, it is the kind of gadget I would have loved to have earlier in my life to play around with doing cool stuff. Being introduced to Linux some year early could have had quite a great impact on my life, and I only wonder what my today could’ve been.
But anyways, I am happy with how things have turned out, since I can still have fun and experiment with what I got today. So since my semester is over and I no longer have an academic use for my Raspi right now, I decided to set it up as a Nextcloud server for my family and personal use.
I have selfhosted a lot of cool services on my Pi in previous times. Stuff like Radicale, Miniflux or Pi-hole. But because of University, I ended up losing all of them because of some problems that made me have to reinstall my OS, I wasn’t happy about it, but I was running a distro that had some missing packages, so I wouldn’t be able to do my school projects unless I distro-hopped.
The point is, I decided to follow this tutorial, and after finally figuring out how to enable PHP8 on my apache server, I got it all working just fine. I won’t be able to really explain everything, but the tutorial covers it quite well and the part of enabling modules is a matter of looking it up (a2enmod is the command needed).
The problem now was, how do I access it from outside my LAN? I had already said many times that I could not open my router ports since I am behind a NAT and as such, I can’t really access my public IP and forward ports or stuff like that.
However, I discovered a tool/service called ZeroTier that basically let’s me be own boss and create my own network of devices. I didn’t even need to look up at a tutorial to figure how it works. But if you want one, there you go.
Now all I had to do was download the app for my phone that works like a VPN and gives me access to my Nextcloud instance from anywhere in the world. The app is FOSS, But it isn’t on F-Droid, so I went with the a fork of it, just to have it my way and get it via IzzyOnDroid’s repo.
So yes, I now have my own instance of Nextcloud. Right now I’m only using my SD card to store everything, but I am planning on getting a 2TB external SSD to be able to mount it and get more storage for it.
