At the beginning of March, I bought a laptop and decided to finally embrace Linux as my daily drive desktop. Till that day I had only used Linux, more precisely Ubuntu, on servers. So, obviously it was my first choice, but I faced a lot of issues, just to find out that the 3rd generation AMD Ryzen CPU on my laptop wasn’t yet supported by the kernel version (5.3) used on Ubuntu 19.10. I wasn’t able to use any Ubuntu based distro. At first it sucked, but now I’m glad that happen!

Although page views aren’t my immediate concern when I write on this blog, is good to know if someone is reading what I share! But when doing it I wanted to assure that I wasn’t tracking you. In others words, that the data gathered couldn’t identify or being associated to you. To do so I started by using the self-hosted version of Fathom.

Unfortunately, some time ago the developers of Fathom decided change their business model. They developed a new version of Fathom, closed source, only for paid customers, named Fathom PRO and renamed the original Fathom as Fathom Lite. Since then the development of this first version seems to had come to an end, as its latest release is from November 2018.

I then started looking for alternatives and that’s when I found this discussion on Lobsters and met GoatCounter. A recent project of an open source and privacy-aware web statistics platform.

On the way to install Nextcloud we’ve already completed the initial setup of our VPS, the installation of Nginx and the installation of PostgreSQL.

I will now cover the installation of PHP 8.1.

Why PHP 8.1? Because, PHP 7.4 has no longer active support and will have its security support ending in November 2022.¹ And, PHP 8.1 is the recommended version to run Nextcloud 25.²

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

On the way to install Nextcloud we’ve already completed the initial setup of our VPS and the installation of a webserver (Nginx).

We’ll now proceed with the installation of PostgreSQL, a relational database management system.

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

This is the second post on the road to self-host Nextcloud. At this point we have already choosed a provider and deployed a VPS and completed its initial setup.

Now, we’re going to cover the installation of Nginx, the use of Let’s Encrypt SSL certificates and the configuration of the web server to use HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS).

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