Nextcloud is great, I self-host an instance at home. I mostly use the calendar, address book, and file sharing with links a la Google Drive. It's probably heavier and slower than it should be for what it does, but it works.
Just like Home Assistant, it is a "must have" tool for self-hosters.
What's your experience like?
Lot's of people say that's a mess to maintain and too broken to actively use.
I often doubt if that's due to actual problems, or mix with that and bad decisions on the setup. Is dockering, keeping the data handling itself outside of it and a few other easy (or not so much) precautions enough to have a somewhat smoother sailing?
Also, how much time do you need to keep things from failing apart?
They have an “all in one” container that supposedly works out of the box.
I didn’t want to give it access to the docker socket, with the ability to spawn its own containers. So instead I just use the nextcloud container directly. (With several other containers, like DB, reverse proxy, collabora, etc) It’s a mess to configure, hence their recommendation to use their “all in one” setup. All sorts of weird defaults with documentation that says “this is the default but you should absolutely change it to do X instead so that it performs better”. Things like setting up a service to generate thumbnails, setting up redis, etc.
Once configured though, it mostly just works. You can’t let it auto update between major versions, but you probably should be doing that anyway. There are usually breaking changes and you have to manually run a command or two between major updates. That doesn’t happen too frequently though.
I can’t speak to the quality of the all-in-one setup. It’s likely easier than what I did - but also what’s the point of putting it in docker and also giving it control of docker? Seems to defeat the point of containerization.
I have instance for couple of years. No issues for now. Never had a feeling it's going to fall apart. I host it via docker image, pull new version from time to time and that's mostly it.
Only two problems I can think of: it's bit slow - even our company instance which has reasonable resources could be bit faster. Also they could use a better UI designer.
None of it is major problem for me. As self-hosted Dropbox/calendar/cospend it's perfectly fine.
I never had any issues with it. The Docker image is basically a turnkey solution. The only extra step was to set up nginx as a reverse proxy. I wouldn't deploy a complex piece of software like Nextcloud without Docker to be honest, and this is coming from someone who runs stuff bare metal when it is practical to do so.
Edit: In view of the other response, I checked my docker-compose and I am also using the community maintained image (https://hub.docker.com/_/nextcloud) instead of the all-in-one image. It is supported by MariaDB, redis, and aio-talk (for Nextcloud Talk).
Another thing: You should not skip major versions when upgrading. Pin the version in your Docker compose file.
I've self-hosted first Owncloud from version 2.x, then moved to Nextcloud when it became clear that was the better option. Early versions could end up non-functional due to update glitches but for the last 3-4 years or so it has been mostly smooth sailing with here and there a glitch due to some app introducing a system-wide behavioural change - looking at you, Richdocuments/Nextcloud Office, stop adding headers to each and every app which cause things like Maps and News to stop functioning. Developing apps for it can sometimes be tedious due to frequent API deprecations which cause a lot of bitrot which in turn means you're own your own when it comes to less frequently updated apps.
It certainly is good enough for active use and, given a well-maintained collection of apps hardly takes any time to maintain. I'd say give it a go, it is free after all.