Installing

After configuring DNS and configuring the playbook, you're ready to install.

Before installing and each time you update the playbook in the future, you will need to update the Ansible roles in this playbook by running just roles. just roles is a shortcut (a roles target defined in justfile and executed by the just utility) which ultimately runs ansible-galaxy to download Ansible roles. If you don't have just, you can also manually run the roles commands seen in the justfile.

Playbook tags introduction

The Ansible playbook's tasks are tagged, so that certain parts of the Ansible playbook can be run without running all other tasks.

The general command syntax is: ansible-playbook -i inventory/hosts setup.yml --tags=COMMA_SEPARATED_TAGS_GO_HERE

Here are some playbook tags that you should be familiar with:

• setup-all - runs all setup tasks (installation and uninstallation) for all components, but does not start/restart services

• install-all - like setup-all, but skips uninstallation tasks. Useful for maintaining your setup quickly when its components remain unchanged. If you adjust your vars.yml to remove components, you'd need to run setup-all though, or these components will still remain installed

• setup-postgres (e.g. setup-postgres) - runs the setup tasks only for a given role, but does not start/restart services. You can discover these additional tags in each role (roles/*/main.yml). Running per-component setup tasks is not recommended, as components sometimes depend on each other

• install-SERVICE (e.g. install-postgres) - like setup-SERVICE, but skips uninstallation tasks. See install-all above for additional information.

• start - starts all systemd services and makes them start automatically in the future

• stop - stops all systemd services

setup-* tags and install-* tags do not start services automatically, because you may wish to do things before starting services, such as importing a database dump, restoring data from another server, etc.

Installation

Run the playbook: ansible-playbook -i inventory/hosts setup.yml --tags=setup-all.

If your inventory file (vars.yml) contains encrypted variables, you may need to pass --ask-vault-pass to the ansible-playbook command.

After installing, you can start services with just start-all (or ansible-playbook -i inventory/hosts setup.yml --tags=start).

Initial Nextcloud setup

After starting the services for the first time, you should follow Nextcloud's setup wizard at https://<your-domain>.

You can choose any username/password for your account.

In Storage & database, you should choose PostgreSQL (changing the default SQLite choice), with the following settings:

• Database user: nextcloud
• Database password: the value of the nextcloud_nextcloud_database_password variable in vars.yml
• Database name: nextcloud
• Database host: nextcloud-postgres:5432

Adjusting the configuration

Once you've fully installed Nextcloud, you'd better edit its default configuration.

This is necessary, because Nextcloud's brute-force security system doesn't like how traffic is being proxied to it (this playbook fronts the nextcloud Apache image with an nginx proxy server).

Thus, we disable Nextcloud's bruteforce security system:

ansible-playbook -i inventory/hosts setup.yml --tags=setup-adjust-nextcloud-config