Finally, I’ll now cover the installation of Nextcloud on Debian!

At this point, is expected that you already had:

• Choose a VPS provider and concluded the initial setup of your Debian server;
• Installed Nginx;
• Installed PostgreSQL;
• Installed PHP 8.1.

I’m currently using Debian 11, but these instructions may be equally valid for other versions of Debian and Ubuntu.

The most recent version of Debian, with the code name “Bullseye”, was released today!

Debian is one of oldest Linux distributions, notorious for been stable and reliable. Used as base for many other distributions. And a popular choice to run on servers.

Debian sees a new release each two years (more or less) and in conjunction with their Long Term Support team, they promise at least 5 years of extended support for the each stable release.

I was waiting with special anticipation for this release, after recently decided to stop relying on enterprise developed distributions.

I’ll now migrate my server from Ubuntu 20.04 to Debian 11 and, therefore, it was only logic that my first step should be update the tutorials on this blog. From the initial server setup, to install Nginx, PostgreSQL and PHP, and finally installing Nextcloud, all were updated to reflect the use of Debian 11.

A year ago, after a couple months of head scratching and intense distro hopping, I settled with Manjaro with Gnome. But it didn’t take long for another Arch based project get my attention!

With their motto “a terminal-centric distro with a vibrant and friendly community at its core”, EndeavourOS sounded perfect.

This is a brief, but long owed post.

Last year, I decided that the best path to claim ownership of my data was self-hosting Nextcloud.¹ I faced some issues using Hetzner’s 1 vCPU plan and I convinced myself that the culprit was their vCPU not being powerful enough.²

If it’s true that their vCPU wasn’t as powerful as Vultr’s one. It’s also true that with the right know-how I would be able to debug the issue and make things work. The culprit was in fact my lack of knowledge.

You may have already notice the contact form on this blog. Until recently, it was handled by Netlify and used a serverless function to send an email both to me and the submitter. This worked fine, but was far from ideal because I had to trust the data to a third party (Netlify).

As I was already running a server (with Nextcloud and Mastodon), I looked for a self-hosted solution and found MailyGo from Jan-Lukas Else. A small tool written in Go that allows send HTML forms through email. Exactly what I was looking for!