Nextcloud - bcgov/common-service-showcase GitHub Wiki

Note: This summary of Nextcloud focuses on how it could fit into the CSS Team's DOMO (Document Management) project.

Licence and Cost

Opensource (licensed under the GNU AGPLv3)
self-hosted
Enterprise version is a paid subscription to a support service. see the FAQ - Enterprise-related question
It is pre-configured, optimized and hardened for the special needs of large scale, production-critical enterprise deployments
See Enterptise pricing

Nextcloud server (Unix OS, Apache or nginx webserver, PHP runtime, MySQL/Postgres,..)
WebDAV and other APIs enable integration with third party applications
Can be extended using 'apps' (contributed modules)
has a web interface (Javascript, JQuery, Vue)
Monitoring and logging streams
Can use OIDC Connect to manage Nextcloud users and Authentication (see: https://www.schiessle.org/articles/2020/07/26/nextcloud-and-openid-connect/)
REDIS caching server can be used to speed up data access and lower the load on the database.

more geared towards users managing/syncing files
drop-box type user interface
Has Desktop and Mobile installed clients (like drop-box) for managing/syncing files
file versioning

Storage can either be mounted on the server or through the Nextcloud interface.
Configure Nextcloud Server to use S3 object storage for its primary or external file storage
You can allow users to mount external storage
Uses wes/aws-sdk-php to speak to S3-compatible storage
If used as Primary storage, you can mount to multiple buckets or one bucket per user.
- Object storage performance characteristics make it most suitable for archival or streaming of large files
- Multi-bucket seems to also overcomes performance limitations of single bucket
- a report that Nextcloud may be slow and unreliable while browsing files stored on external storage or uploading content.
- One can extend the 'External Storage Support' app (module) if neccessary
Usage of Amazon S3 or a compatible object storage can be secured through server side encryption on the Nextcloud server
The optional full text search feature requires an Apache Solr Java servlet

Client APIs - could be used by a government app to run file operations on a centralised Nextcloud server.

OCS API (a mixtrue of Webdav and REST, developed by Nextcloud)
- has a more features than just WebDav, for file managing, sharing and other collaboration tools
- Sharing REST API.
Webdav API (an extension of http protocol)
- access files with: http://localhost:8080/remote.php/dav/files/admin/
- file-related operations, sharing, versioning, basic searchs
- Requests authenticated with Basic Auth or session cookies
- eg: Upload a file:
  - PUT https://demo1.nextcloud.com/remote.php/webdav/test-file-upload.txt
  - do a PROPFIND request that returns XML about a file
  - or GET storage details that returns JSON

Run Nextcloud server
- Install Nextcloud using docker image
  - see: https://github.com/nextcloud/docker
  - admin / pass
Configure with Object Storage
Call Nextcloud API from a NodeJS application

while very useful for governement staff, does not typically serve as an API for service client applications.