How to Set Up Your Own Private Cloud Storage Service in Five Minutes with ownCloud

A lot of people want to pull their data off the cloud for a variety of reasons. Instead of missing out on those great syncing features, though, you can create your own cloud storage service that you control with a service called ownCloud. The best part: it only takes about five minutes to get it set up.

The nontechnical way: SaaS
In this short tutorial, we’ll show you how to get ownCloud up and running quickly using Docker on macOS, Windows, and 64-bit Linux. If this sounds too technical for you, consider using our software-as-a-service offering ownCloud.online, where we host your very own single-instance ownCloud for a competitive per-user fee. Registration and instance creation only take a few minutes.

Using Docker
While you can install ownCloud the traditional way on a LAMP server consiting of a Linux operating system, an Apache webserver, a Mysql/MariaDB database and PHP, we recommend using Docker for swift delivery and compatibility. Docker delivers software in containers using OS-level virtualization.

Step 1: Install Docker

Windows: https://docs.docker.com/docker-for-windows/install/
macOS: https://docs.docker.com/docker-for-mac/install/
Linux: Install the Docker Engine and Docker Compose according to your OS specifics

Step 2: In your terminal, create the ownCloud folder and cd into the folder (for example mkdir owncloud-docker-server and then cd owncloud-docker-server)

Step 3: Get the Docker compose file, e.g. through wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/owncloud/docs/master/modules/admin_manual/examples/installation/docker/docker-compose.yml

Step 4: Set the environment parameters needed – please change domain, admin username and admin password accordingly:

cat .env
OWNCLOUD_VERSION=10.6
OWNCLOUD_DOMAIN=localhost:8080
ADMIN_USERNAME=admin
ADMIN_PASSWORD=admin
HTTP_PORT=8080
EOF

Step 5: Set up your ownCloud through the command docker-compose up -d and wait until it the process is ready

Step 6: Login to your ownCloud at localhost:8080 or whatever domain you chose to use

Step 7: Install the ownCloud Desktop Client and the ownCloud App for iOS or Android and connect them to your ownCloud

Step 8: Open your browser and log into your new ownCloud at http://localhost:8080!

In an upcoming post, we’ll explain how to add ssl and a custom domain to your new ownCloud.