The latest release of NextCloudPi is out!

The key improvement is bringing fully automating Nextcloud updates. This was the last piece of the puzzle, and finally we can leave the board just sitting there and everything will be automatically be kept up to date: Debian packages, Nextcloud and NextCloudPi itself.

Also, work has been focused on bringing NextCloudPi to more boards, making backup/restore as resiliant as possible, and of course implementing many improvements and small fixes.

On a more social note, I was interviewed by Nextcloud as a part of the community, so check it out if you would like to learn some more things about me and the project.

NextCloudPi improves everyday thanks to your feedback. Please report any problems here. Also, you can discuss anything in the forums, or hang out with us in Telegram.

Last but not least, please download through bitorrent and share it for a while to help keep hosting costs down.

Name change

Wait, didn’t we change the name to NextCloudPlus? Well, I am sad to announce that we have to move back to the original name, and here we will stay for the rest of time.

I understand this is confusing but it turns out that we are incuring into trademark issues with Nextcloud GmbH. It was my mistake to assume that we could just change names, and Nextcloud was nice to let us keep the old name so that’s exactly what we are doing.

We don’t want to harm the Nextcloud brand in any way (quite the opposite!) or any trouble, so I bought nextcloudpi.com, undid everything and just move on to more motivating issues.

Nextcloud 13.0.2

This Nextcloud minor version comes mainly with improved UI, better end-to-end encryption and small fixes. Check out the release notes for more details.

Automatic Nextcloud updates

Finally here! NCP is now capable of upgrading to the latest Nextcloud version in a safe manner. This can be done automatically or on demand, by using nc-update-nextcloud, and nc-autoupdate-nc respectively.

This means that we can just stop worrying about checking for updates, and all the box software will be up to date: Nextcloud, Debian security packages and NextCloudPi itself. We will be notified whenever this happens.

A lot of care has been taken on testing every possible situation, even sudden power loss during the update, to make sure that the system will just roll back to the previous state if anything goes wrong.

At this point, the autoupdate is not enabled by default. If we continue not to see any problems with it it well be activated by default in the future during the first run wizard.

All feedback is welcome!

Rock64

Rock64 SD card images ready to run with Nextcloud and all the NCP extra goodies are now available for download. This board is thought of as the perfect NAS solution, featuring real Gigabit Ethernet (*) and USB3, but at a very low price tag, starting at 25$.

If you want something nicer than the RPi but the Odroid HC2 is too expensive, this is a great investment.

(*) Unlike the Raspberry Pi 3B+. More on this in following posts.

Banana Pi

The first testing build for the Banana Pi is also available for download. This board is popular for its SATA port, and Gigabit Ethernet so it is also a popular low cost NAS solution, despite the bad kernel support, GPL violations and some of the questionable practices of Allwinner. Luckily we have the Linux Sunxi community to the rescue!

This is a testing release, consider it work in progress.

Potato Pi

Sooner or later we will have NCP running everywhere. Jim is still trying to make his NCPotato board boot, he keeps saying that he almost has it. Good luck Jim!

Let’s take this oportunity to announce that we need tons of help to support more boards! The machinery is in place, and we now need people to help with building / testing / improving other boards.

As long as the board is supported by Armbian, it is really not complicated to build your own SD card image with NCP on it. Please share it with us!

Armbian integration

The patches have been merged to add NCP to the Armbian software installer. This is just another way to make it easy for people to install Nextcloud. Every Armbian board will be capable of installing NCP right out of the box.

Conversations have started to do the same thing with DietPi.

Chinese web

Last but not least, initial suppot for Chinese has been added to ncp-web. Thanks Carl Hung and Yi Chi for the help!