Running owncloud on Gentoo stable

As I migrated to clean data layout (see previous post) I decided to be cool&trendy guy and fire up my own lovely cloudy service.

First my thinking was bit off regular setup, because even if we have in-tree ebuild of owncloud it hard-requires apache, which I find overkill here.

So I introduce you to secret approach how to make it work with ngnix and sqlite3. Before you say that I should use *insertothercooldbname* please think of that my deployment is only for handfull users and I tested it with 5 users connected at once each of them having access to 1 tb shared datastore and it proven fast enough.

Preparing keywords/useflags/etc

Well owncloud is testing, so unmask it:

scarabeus@htpc: /etc/portage $ cat package.keywords/own-cloud
www-apps/owncloud

We need dav for direct access and php stuff for the setup (some useflags might be useless or redundant):

scarabeus@htpc: /etc/portage $ cat package.use/own-cloud
dev-lang/php pdo sqlite3 curl xmlwriter gd truetype cgi force-cgi-redirect fpm
www-servers/nginx nginx_modules_http_dav

Now silently punt the apache away as we love nginx:

scarabeus@htpc: /etc/portage $ cat make.profile/package.provided
virtual/httpd-php-5.4

And put all this to good use by emerging required stuff:

emerge -v www-servers/nginx www-apps/owncloud

Setting up the stuff

As nginx does not have any fcgi we will use the fpm from php directly. For that we need to add it to runlevel rc-update add php-fpm default and set up a bit default number of spawned servers (config is in /etc/php/fpm-php5.4/php-fpm.conf). Also remeber to set there proper user/group there, or you won’t be able to store content in your cloud, just read from it.

Then we set up the nginx (/etc/nginx/nginx.conf and /etc/nginx/fastcgi_params). To keep this short and easy I will just post the config I used and let you to google for other nginx variables.
First the conf file:

        server {
                listen 80;
                server_name hostname;
                rewrite ^ https://$server_name$request_uri? permanent;  # enforce https
        }

        server {
                listen 443;
                server_name hostname;

                ssl on;
                ssl_certificate /etc/ssl/nginx/nginx.crt;
                ssl_certificate_key /etc/ssl/nginx/nginx.key;

                access_log /var/log/nginx/htpc.access_log main;
                error_log /var/log/nginx/htpc.error_log info;

                root /var/www/htpc/htdocs/owncloud/;

                client_max_body_size 8M;
                create_full_put_path on;
                dav_access user:rw group:rw all:r;

                index index.php;

                location ~ ^/(data|config|\.ht|db_structure\.xml|README) {
                        deny all;
                }

                location / {
                        rewrite ^/.well-known/host-meta /public.php?service=host-meta last;
                        rewrite ^/.well-known/carddav /remote.php/carddav/ redirect;
                        rewrite ^/.well-known/caldav /remote.php/caldav/ redirect;
                        rewrite ^/apps/calendar/caldav.php /remote.php/caldav/ last;
                        rewrite ^/apps/contacts/carddav.php /remote.php/carddav/ last;
                        rewrite ^/apps/([^/]*)/(.*\.(css|php))$ /index.php?app=$1&getfile=$2 last;
                        rewrite ^/remote/(.*) /remote.php/$1 last;

                        try_files $uri $uri/ @webdav;
                }

                location @webdav {
                        fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+\.php)(/.*)$;
                        fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000;
                        include fastcgi_params;
                        fastcgi_param HTTPS on;
                }

                location ~* ^.+.(jpg|jpeg|gif|bmp|ico|png|css|js|swf)$ {
                        expires 30d;
                        access_log off;
                }

                location ~ \.php$ {
                        fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+\.php)(/.*)$;
                        fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000;
                        include fastcgi_params;
                        fastcgi_index index.php;
                        fastcgi_intercept_errors on;
                        try_files $uri =404;
                }
        }

For the fcgi we also need some params to make the webdav work:

fastcgi_param   SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
fastcgi_param   SCRIPT_NAME     $fastcgi_script_name;
fastcgi_param   PATH_INFO       $fastcgi_path_info;

That should be it, now we just deploy the owncloud to our webserver by webapp-config:

/usr/sbin/webapp-config -I -h htpc -u root -d /owncloud owncloud 4.0.7

After we start up the webserver and fcgi provider, we should be up and running to open the stuff in web browsers.

Few issues I didn’t manage to sort out in owncloud

• External module to load all system users into it does not pass the auth
• Google sync just timeouts everytime I try it (I maybe have just damn huge content here)
• External storage support from within owncloud didn’t work for me, I just symlinked the data folder to the proper places under each user and logged into them in browser, then waited for 3 hours (1tb of data to index) and they were able to access everything.