New Server Setup (Debian)

Plan

plan is extremally simple:

1. Install Debian on server.
2. Install the media Drive.
3. Install Nextcloud and monitoring/displaying software to make it all pretty.

Debian Install

This step i thought would take somewhere around a hour but i was stuck here for 3 days. the thing was that i didn’t had beefy enough USB drive, but as always i would realize that far into the project, after i would try every possible configuration starting from Rufus all the way to the custom made ISOs, but nothing worked other than most bizarre solution:

1. Install Arch(BTW) on a USB drive since it is so lite.
2. Get Arch running.
3. Install the media SSD.
4. mount the internal storage, since live USB has limited storage.
5. Install and flash Debian ISO in media Drive.
6. Boot from that drive and install Debian. and i had that working just fine, other than some packages straight up not working.

Configuration

Coming from Ubuntu server Debian is not as defaulted in terms of configurations, even the aliases are commented out so there was a a plenty things to setup way i like it.

sudo and su

Also no sudo by default, witch was surprising until i found out the reason, that sudo is just su do, so telling the superuser to do one thing and for authorization it uses the current users password. so using su is better for security and I’m getting along with it quite nicely.

.bashrc

Also I wanted this server to resemble the Debian setup that i have in termux on my phone so kind of like a station so had to display some ASCII art,fastfetch and micro instead of nano. Custom PS1, but nothing fancy just red colored root for super user and green for others.

Software Install

Monitoring/Always On Display

This new top child called btop looks cool and is actually useful and feature dense and just look at it: this one is not mine though, but i will be experimenting with it and the themes look so good too.

for monitoring i will be using btop looks nice and is displaying some useful general info that i need.

Nextcloud setup

Easiest way to run Nextcloud is with container, but since I’m using btop i want to monitor everything separately and not as one docker program for example, so i will be installing it manually, following the official manual witch uses LAMP Stack.

PHP Install

Recommended PHP version, for now, is v8.3 and in Debian repos there is only the newest version that can be installed like this:

apt install -y php libapache2-mod-php php-mysql php-mbstring

so for specific version, i added sury.org repository: first install tools, get the sign and add repo:

apt install -y apt-transport-https lsb-release ca-certificates curl
curl -sSLo /usr/share/keyrings/deb.sury.org-php.gpg https://packages.sury.org/php/apt.gpg 
echo "deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/deb.sury.org-php.gpg] https://packages.sury.org/php/ $(lsb_release -sc) main" | tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/php.list 

update apt repos

apt update

and now install specific versions

apt install php8.3 libapache2-mod-php8.3 php8.3-mysql php8.3-mbstring

test PHP

First check the version to see if its even installed:

php -v

Then add new php file in apache directory with your editor of choice:

micro /var/www/html/test.php

and add test PHP code like:

<?php
phpinfo();
?>

save the changes. then restart apache2

systemctl restart apache2

and from browser navigate to the newly added page http://<Server's IP>/test.php/ and here should be the information about php, meaning it is in working state.

Installing required PHP extensions

Nextcloud needs some extensions to work as intended:

apt install -y php php-mysql php-gd php-xml php-mbstring php-curl php-zip php-intl php-bcmath php-gmp libapache2-mod-php unzip wget

or the specific versions of this.

MariaDB Install

MariaDB is is the suggested database for Nextcloud so i installed it:

apt install -y mariadb-server mariadb-client

start and enable it:

systemctl start mariadb && systemctl enable mariadb
systemctl status mariadb

and status should be active.

and now to secure it run a script named mariadb-secure-installation

mariadb-secure-installation

and follow the installation, set root password, remove anonymous users so only set users can login, disallow remote root login for security reasons, remove unnecessary test database and reload the privilege table.

Create Database For Nextcloud

mariadb is drop in replacement for mysql, also a fork of it and developed my same guy so both of them will work. log into the mariadb database as root with password you set in last step:

mariadb -uroot -p

and from there create database:

CREATE DATABASE <database name>;

• Replace <database name> with actual name for your database (e.g. nextcloud_db). This is needed for Initial setup of Nextcloud. Create new user for Nextcloud to use:

CREATE USER <database username>@localhost IDENTIFIED BY '<password for this user>';  

• Replace <database username> with actual username and <password for this user> withe secure password for that user, these will also be needed for initial setup of Nextcloud. ’localhost’ is used since the Nextcloud and the database are on the same server.
  Give permissions for the database to user, both of witch we just made in an earlier steps.

GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON <database name>.* TO <database username>@localhost;

and flush the privileges and exit:

FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
EXIT

Apache2 Install

[Apache2] is for actual serving webpages to the servers IP address or domain.

Debian 13 didn’t had this installed by default so:

apt install -y apache2

then start and enable it:

systemctl start apache2 && systemctl enable apache2
systemctl status apache2

And visiting the http://<Servers IP> should display the default apache2 page for Debian after firewall is configured.

Firewall configuration

configuring the firewall is critical part of this for security and for it to work properly. so i installed ufw (Uncomplicated Firewall) witch is a frontend for iptables or nftables, making it easier to manage rules without complex syntax. Install:

apt install -y ufw

and configured to enable incoming http and https requests, loopback, witch is a virtual interface lo and is used for local services to communicate and not use the external interfaces like wlan0 or eth0, and also SSH connections:

ufw enable
ufw status
ufw allow ssh
ufw allow http
ufw allow https
ufw allow in on lo
ufw reload
ufw status

and as a result I got:

Status: active

To                         Action      From
--                         ------      ----
22/tcp                     ALLOW       Anywhere
80/tcp                     ALLOW       Anywhere
443                        ALLOW       Anywhere
Anywhere on lo             ALLOW       Anywhere
22/tcp (v6)                ALLOW       Anywhere (v6)
80/tcp (v6)                ALLOW       Anywhere (v6)
443 (v6)                   ALLOW       Anywhere (v6)
Anywhere (v6) on lo        ALLOW       Anywhere (v6)

Apache2 Configuration

First change the working directory to where apache2 serving files are located at:

cd /var/www/html/

Get the latest version of Nextcloud from the official website and unzip and delete it:

wget https://download.nextcloud.com/server/releases/latest.zip
unzip latest.zip
rm -f latest.zip

correct the ownership and permissions so Apache can access the unzipped folder nextcloud:

chown -R www-data:www-data nextcloud/
chmod -R 755 nextcloud/
ls -l

list should show this:

drwxr-xr-x 14 www-data www-data  4096 Sep 27 11:55 nextcloud

Then i added single configuration file. for Debian it should in this path:

micro /etc/apache2/sites-available/nextcloud.conf

and insert this content:

<VirtualHost *:80>
  DocumentRoot /var/www/html/nextcloud/
  DocumentRoot  192.168.1.10
  
  <Directory /var/www/html/nextcloud/>
    Require all granted
    AllowOverride All
    Options FollowSymLinks MultiViews
  
  <IfModule mod_dav.c>
      Dav off
    </IfModule>
  </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

and replace DocumentRoot, DocumentRoot and Directory according to your setup but this works for this documentation. To enable the site run:

a2ensite nextcloud.conf

Enable additional modules:

a2enmod rewrite headers mime env dir

And restart Apache to apply changes:

systemctl restart apache2

Web interface setup

On browser go to the domain name or the IP of the server. The first Time visit asks for configuration like admin username and password. Also Data folder, this is where data is saved at and by default it is set to the same directory were app is server from + /data. setting custom path is simple:

mkdir nextcloud
chown -R www-data:www-data nextcloud/
chmod -R 700 nextcloud/
ls -l

this could be ran everywhere and gives correct, permissions:

drwx------ 2 www-data www-data  4096 Oct 12 15:29 nextcloud

and also .ncdata file should be present in the data folder:

micro ./nextcloud/.ncdata

and it should have this:

# Nextcloud data directory

And fill in the database information from previous steps and hit install.

CLI only install

For me web UI didn’t work so i changed directory to the Nextcloud and ran this:

php occ  maintenance:install  --database '<mysql>' --database-name '<database name>'  --d
atabase-user '<database user>' --database-pass '<data base user password>'  --admin-user '<admin name>' --admin-pass '<admin password>'

replace the items that are like this < >.after install edit the config/config.php to adjust some desired setting like trusted domains and data folder path(this still needs .mcdata file in there with same # Nextcloud data directory content) after that reapply all the permissions to all Nextcloud directories and all set.

Finish

Now that all of this is done I will be adding users to Nextcloud and make it usable for other at my house and maybe if specs help me i will move this to different port and also run PIHole on here too.