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!

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.

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.

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.