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Daphne Muller
Daphne Muller

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Developing with Nextcloud - Part 1 -Setting up for development

Who is Nextcloud?

Nextcloud is a team of enthusiastic open source developers who love to create a fully open source file sync-and-share solution. We love our Nextcloud community and a lot of our drive comes from giving the people what they need, and a lot of the PR's and apps come from our community and they develop brilliant things. 😉

We also make sure that Nextcloud works on a Raspberry Pi as well as on a Galera Cluster so everyone can benefit from the project.

Why develop with Nextcloud?

Whether it's getting a handle on your photos, your budget or your recipe collection, Nextcloud is your one stop shop for degooglifying yourself. But there are as many needs for applications as there are people in the world. Nextcloud offers you the basics to build your app upon. Authentication, file handling and sharing, access control, mobile and desktop clients - don't worry about that, we got you covered! All you need to do is think of an app that you'd like to have and start coding. Or if you've already found an app that you love but it misses stuff you'd like to see, go ahead - all code is open source and available on GitHub and you can easily open a PR to add your feature.

We develop with PHP and VueJS. So whether you're frontend, backend or full-stack, I'm sure you can find some fun challenges to work on. We offer a large library of ready- to use Vue components too, so you can pick and choose.

Part 1: Setting up your development environment

We created an easy to follow tutorial to set up your development environment for Nextcloud using docker.

This tutorial is perfect for you if you wish to set up a locally running development environment for Nextcloud development and Nextcloud app development. It will take you, depending on your operating system, half an hour to a few hours to set up.

If you are just looking for something quick for a little bit of experimenting or a workshop, you might prefer to use the DevContainer instead in combination with GitHub Codespaces. That would give you a development environment with just a few clicks in which you can also start the app tutorials.

In this tutorial you will learn how to set up your development environment using docker. After this tutorial you will know:

  • How to install the docker desktop app on your machine

  • How to run Nextcloud locally

  • How to add a template app to your local Nextcloud

The steps of the tutorial are different depending of your operating system, so we provided a tutorial for Ubuntu users, Mac users, and Windows users.

You can find the tutorial here: https://cloud.nextcloud.com/s/iyNGp8ryWxc7Efa?path=%2F1%20Setting%20up%20a%20development%20environment

🤔 Do you have questions?

Just post your questions below this post and we will try to see if we can help you further!

More tutorials

If you would like to go through more tutorials, we have collected them here:

https://www.nextcloud.com/developer

Next week we will post the second part of the tutorial for your first simple app.

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