Introduction
The Cloud can be a great thing. It can also be a terrifying Orwellian nightmare where some faceless corporate entity has every picture you’ve ever taken of your family. To prevent the latter, there’s Nextcloud.
You many have heard of Owncloud. It was the primary solution for open source self hosted cloud storage for quite some time. Unfortunately, due to internal struggles, Owncloud split. Owncloud still remains, but it is currently owned by the people that caused the split. Nextcloud, on the other hand, is run by the original founder and the people who wanted to continue to work with the open source community.
Before you start the Nextcloud install process, you should follow our other guide on setting up a LAMP server on Debian Stretch. Nextcloud is a PHP application that utilizes a database and works best when paired with Apache. Having a LAMP server set up will be the best starting point.