Installing Nextcloud v31 on Debian 13 (trixie) using php8.4-fpm, redis and apcu

This is a concise tutorial, it is not meant to be a hand holding step by step guide. Please comment or contact me if you find errors.

Prerequisites:
Setup a domain/sub domain with an A record to the ip of the server or a CNAME to a “dynamic DNS” hostname. I recommend https://freedns.afraid.org.
The server needs to have ports 80 and 443 reachable to the public. The DNS must be propagated for letsencrypt to be successful.

Start the install

apt-get install apache2 mariadb-server libapache2-mod-fcgid php-fpm php php-gd php-json php-mysql php-curl php-mbstring php-intl php-imagick php-xml php-zip php-bz2 python3-certbot-apache php-apcu redis-server php-redis php-bcmath php-gmp ffmpeg curl coreutils libmagickcore-7.q16-10-extra

Download Nextcloud

wget https://download.nextcloud.com/server/releases/latest-31.tar.bz2

Make sure the md5 matches

md5sum latest-31.tar.bz2

curl https://download.nextcloud.com/server/releases/latest-31.tar.bz2.md5

Extract the tar file and change permissions

tar xfv latest-31.tar.bz2

mv nextcloud/ /var/www/example.com/
chown www-data:www-data -R /var/www/example.com/

[Setup Apache]

Create a apache virtual site

cp /etc/apache2/sites-available/000-default.conf /etc/apache2/sites-available/example.com.conf

edit /etc/apache2/sites-available/example.com.conf

uncomment and change

ServerName example.com

change the document root

DocumentRoot /var/www/example.com

change log location if you would like

ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/example.com_error.log
CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/example.com_access.log combined

enable example.com in apache

a2ensite example.com

a2enmod proxy_fcgi setenvif rewrite headers env dir mime userdir dav ssl

a2enconf php8.4-fpm

service apache2 restart

Setup Letsencrypt

certbot --apache -d example.com

tell it to redirect http to https

Edit /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/example.com-le-ssl.conf

  <Directory /var/www/example.com/>
    Require all granted
    AllowOverride All
    Options FollowSymLinks MultiViews

    <IfModule mod_dav.c>
      Dav off
    </IfModule>
  </Directory>

To avoid certain race conditions between the /etc/apache2/sites-available/example.com.conf and /etc/apache2/sites-available/000-default.conf
I prefer to remove example.com.conf and move the http->https redirect into the 000-default.conf

cat /etc/apache2/sites-available/example.com.conf

….snip…

# include a line for only one particular virtual host. For example the
# following line enables the CGI configuration for this host only
# after it has been globally disabled with “a2disconf”.
#Include conf-available/serve-cgi-bin.conf
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{SERVER_NAME} =example.com
RewriteRule ^ https://%{SERVER_NAME}%{REQUEST_URI} [END,NE,R=permanent]
</VirtualHost>

# vim: syntax=apache ts=4 sw=4 sts=4 sr noet

copy the rewrite rule at the bottom:

RewriteEngine on 
RewriteCond %{SERVER_NAME} =example.com 
RewriteRule ^ https://%{SERVER_NAME}%{REQUEST_URI} [END,NE,R=permanent] 

edit and paste into the default conf

vi /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default.conf

This is what 000-default.conf should look like

<VirtualHost *:80>

ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost
DocumentRoot /var/www/html

ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error.log
CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access.log combined

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{SERVER_NAME} =example.com
RewriteRule ^ https://%{SERVER_NAME}%{REQUEST_URI} [END,NE,R=permanent]

</VirtualHost>

[Configure PHP]

edit /etc/php/8.4/fpm/php.ini

memory_limit = 768M
upload_max_filesize = 1024M
post_max_size = 1024M
max_execution_time = 300

[Create a database, user and password for nextcloud]

mariadb -uroot

CREATE USER 'nextcloud'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'PASSWORD';

CREATE DATABASE IF NOT EXISTS nextcloud;

GRANT SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, CREATE, DROP, INDEX, ALTER, CREATE TEMPORARY TABLES ON nextcloud.* TO 'nextcloud'@'localhost';

FLUSH privileges;

[Install Nextcloud]

run the installer at https://example.com/

[Setup Redis]

edit /etc/redis/redis.conf
Under the # Unix socket. section add the following

port 0
unixsocket /run/redis/redis-server.sock
unixsocketperm 770

add www-data to redis group

usermod -a -G redis www-data

/etc/group will now have an entry like this “redis:x:119:www-data”

systemctl enable redis-server

Add the following to /var/www/example.com/config/config.php

This is using APCu for memcache and Redis for distributed caching and file locking. Here we use a socket to connect to redis-server.

  'memcache.local' => '\OC\Memcache\APCu',

  'memcache.distributed' => '\OC\Memcache\Redis',
  'memcache.locking' => '\OC\Memcache\Redis',

  'redis' => [
    'host'     => '/run/redis/redis-server.sock',
    'port'     => 0,
  ],

add the following to /etc/php/8.4/fpm/php.ini

opcache.enable=1
opcache.enable_cli=1
opcache.memory_consumption=200
opcache.interned_strings_buffer=16
opcache.max_accelerated_files=10000
opcache.save_comments=1
opcache.revalidate_freq = 1

systemctl restart redis-server

systemctl restart apache2

add apc cli enabling line in here -> /etc/php/8.4/cli/php.ini

apc.enable_cli=1

systemctl restart php8.4-fpm.service

[Setup cron for Nextcloud]

crontab -u www-data -e

*/5 * * * * php -f /var/www/example.com/cron.php

done;