Containerized Nextcloud & Owncloud

I've been using Nextcloud for several years.  I prefer Owncloud but Owncloud, IMO, is pretty arcane.  The con for Nextcloud is that it feels heavy and is slow.

Nextcloud is a PITA to maintain via snaps in Ubuntu.  Something is always breaking or not working properly and most of those issues tend to be related to snaps.

I decided to try Nextcloud via containers.  I am very surprised - it feels light and quick in comparison to installing natively on HDD.  The host system has an SSD.  I deployed it via Portainer, but I had to butcher someone  else's docker compose YML file.  The file looks ugly but I've a running system.  This is my second attempt at deploying Nextcloud as a container - the first attempt had DB access issues that I was having a difficult time sorting.

Even when importing files (videos, pictures, and music) into Nextcloud, there was less of a system load.

For now, I'll monitor the system while using it with a small subset of data (it currently has 40 GB of files).  I don't want to spend the effort of moving a massive amount of files only for the instance to die (I do have persistent volumes enabled for the container, though).  The app container is consuming 4 GB of memory, though - that's a bit high, IMO...not sure if it's experiencing a memory leak, as it's using 4 GB while idle.

UPDATE (11/14/2025):

I decided to try to deploy a containerized Owncloud instance.  The compose YML file was a bit more beefy.  It was copied from the Owncloud documentation.  

I had to deploy this one from CLI, for now...I ran into an issue that I need to sort out - once I sort it out, I'll redeploy using Portainer.

I did run into an environment setting issue.  OWNCLOUD_TRUSTED_DOMAINS needed an IP value (IP of the server itself) - the documentation is vague on this and I found the answer from within a bug report.

I thought that a containerized Nextcloud instance was quick - this server is even quicker than a containerized Nextcloud instance.

I will have a bake-off of these two instances, but I suspect I'll be again adopting Owncloud as a docker cloud app.

UPDATE (11/17/2025):

One thing that is super weird is that Owncloud won't allow uploading of directories.  To upload a directory of MP3s, for example, I've to create a folder named, "MP3s" and then upload all the files within the MP3 directory.  WTF?!  Note that I can move folders if I use the Owncloud client software.  I'm not wanting to install the client software on every system I have.  It's like they're actively fighting to not have a directory upload feature.  With Nextcloud (and Google Drive, and OneDrive), I just have to select the folder and the whole folder is treated as an object (meaning, the the directory and it's contents will be uploaded/downloaded).  It's damned silly not to include it.  I think I ran into the same issue years ago when I used Owncloud (like 7+ years ago!).  I researched and someone said, well it works with Google...blame the browser creators (double-WTF?!)  Nah...I'm blaming Owncloud because things like that are silly and if they're doing things like this, what else are they doing within the code?  It looks like Owncloud decided for me which to use (and it's not Owncloud).  I'm glad I didn't manually install it, only to see the lack of directory uploading.  

Containers Update

I posted awhile back that I was having issues with a containerized deployment of Pihole.

I also posted not long ago that I decided to use Portainer to manage my deployment container stacks.

I thought I could fix the original Pihole container, but after seeing it die again, I immediately began work on using a different system as a host for the containers.  

I have three laptops that weren't being used.  Each was running Window desktop OS variants.  I wanted to install Linux on each.

The three candidate replacement systems were:

Dell Latitude E5530:  This system is a very old system that I bought used for $100 - 4 GB of RAM; i5-3380 CPU

Alienware 15 R2:  This system is also an older system, but not quite as old as the E5530 system mentioned above.  This was used by my daughter.  We initially thought the system was broken but I couldn't find anything wrong with it.  It ias 8 GB of RAM and uses the i5-6300 CPU.  It has a 1 TB HDD.  It also has a small (256 GB) SSD.

Alienware M17x R3:  This system is also an olser system but has the best specs of the three candidate systems:  12 GB RAM, i7-2760QM CPU; 750 GB SSD

I installed Ubuntu 24.04 onto each of the three systems, testing to determine how well that Ubuntu version would operate on those hardware platforms (while also keeping in mind that they were laptops).

I found that the Alienware M17x system was the most robust and ran Ubuntu without issues.  The other two systems run Ubuntu well enough, but I noticed they were under higher load when idle.

As the systems already had Ubuntu, it was pretty easy for me to install the prerequisite packages for Docker.  It was super easy to get my containers up and running again on the new host.

On top of that, I installed Portainer not long after getting the new host sorted.  I then had to duplicate the Pihole container from within Portainer so that Portainer would have full control over it.  Until I did that, I had limited control over Pihole using Portainer.  Note that I've already posted about Portainer.

I've been monitoring the new host and redeployed hosts.  I've noticed no issues.

I also kept the original system running (a Dell XPS 8930 with an i5-8400 CPU, 8 GB RAM, and 1 TB HDD).  A Pihole container is still running on that host and it hasn't thrown errors since I moved to a new hosting system, oddly enough.  

About the only thing that I had to enable as a requirement was for the M17x system to not sleep/hibernate when I closed the lid.  I found a way to disable hibernation on that host.

As a server, the M17x runs like a champ, especially when Linux is used.

I'd still be using that system if it weren't for the fact that it tends to eat GPUs.  It's been through two Nvidia GeForce 580M GPUs and those weren't cheap.  I think it was the 580Ms that were fragile.

In fact, all of those Dell systems responded extremely well to Linux, especially the Alienware 15 R2, as Windows was choking it...this was why my daughter stopped using it.  It was running Windows 10 when she stopped using it and while I couldn't find anything wrong with the system, when I was troubleshooting, I saw that the HDD appeared to be what was choking the system. Drive resources were constantly pegged when monitoring Task Manager.  That all stopped when I installed Ubuntu.  That's the power of Linux right there!

I'll update the blog if I see anything bad, but I've been monitoring the new host for almost 2 months and I've not seen any issues.