How to install Nextcloud 11 on CentOS 7

Update the system

First of all login to your CentOS 7 VPS via SSH as user root:

ssh root@IP_Address

and make sure that it is fully up to date:

yum -y update

Install MariaDB server

Nextcloud requires an empty database, so we will install MariaDB server:

yum -y install mariadb mariadb-server

Once it is installed, start MariaDB and enable it to start on boot:

systemctl start mariadb
systemctl enable mariadb

and run the mysql_secure_installation post-installation script to finish the MariaDB set-up:

mysql_secure_installation

Enter current password for root (enter for none): ENTER
Set root password? [Y/n] Y
Remove anonymous users? [Y/n] Y
Disallow root login remotely? [Y/n] Y
Remove test database and access to it? [Y/n] Y
Reload privilege tables now? [Y/n] Y

Once MariaDB is installed, login to the database server as user root, and create database and user for Nextcloud:

mysql -u root -p

MariaDB [(none)]> CREATE DATABASE nextcloud;
MariaDB [(none)]> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON nextcloud.* TO 'nextclouduser'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'YOURPASSWORD';
MariaDB [(none)]> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
MariaDB [(none)]> \q

Install Apache Web Server

Next, we will install Apache web server:

yum install httpd -y

start Apache and make it start on boot:

systemctl start httpd.service
systemctl enable httpd.service

Install PHP 7

The default PHP version on CentOS 7 is PHP 5.4. In this tutorial, we will install PHP version 7.

Install Remi and EPEL repository packages:

rpm -Uvh http://rpms.remirepo.net/enterprise/remi-release-7.rpm
rpm -Uvh https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-7.noarch.rpm

Enable Remi PHP 7 repo:

yum-config-manager --enable remi-php70

and install PHP 7 and several PHP modules required by Nextcloud by executing the following command:

yum -y install php php-mysql php-pecl-zip php-xml php-mbstring php-gd

Next, open the PHP configuration file and increase the upload file size. You can find the location of the PHP configuration file by executing the following command:

php --ini |grep Loaded
Loaded Configuration File:         /etc/php.ini

In our case, we have to make changes to the /etc/php.ini file. We will increase the default upload limit to 100 MB. You can set the values according to your needs. Run the following commands:

sed -i "s/post_max_size = 8M/post_max_size = 100M/" /etc/php.ini
sed -i "s/upload_max_filesize = 2M/upload_max_filesize = 100M/" /etc/php.ini

and restart the web server:

systemctl restart httpd

Install Nextcloud

Go to Nextcloud’s official website and download the latest stable release of the application

wget https://download.nextcloud.com/server/releases/nextcloud-11.0.2.zip

unpack the downloaded zip archive to the document root directory on your server

unzip nextcloud-11.0.2.zip -d /var/www/html/

Set the Apache user to be owner of the Nextcloud files

chown -R apache:apache /var/www/html/nextcloud/

Finally, access Nextcloud at http://yourIP/nextcloud . The installation wizard will check if all requirements and if everything is OK, you will be prompted to create your admin user and select storage and database. Select MySQL/MariaDB as database and enter the details for the database we created earlier in this post:

Database user: nextclouduser
Database password: YOURPASSWORD
Database name: nextcloud
host: localhost