How to Install ownCloud on Debian 10 (Buster)

Written by Rahul, Updated on March 7, 2020

ownCloud is a software application provide self hosted file hosting services. You can install owncloud application on your server and use it as your own file server. Where you can easily upload/sync files from the client machine. It also provides options to sync and share across devices—all under your control. This tutorial will help you to set up your own file hosting server with the ownCloud on Debian 10 Buster Linux system.

Prerequsites

Shell access to Debian 10 Linux system
Sudo privilege account access

Step 1 – Install LAMP

The first of all, to set up ownCloud you must have running LAMP server on your Debian 10 system. If you already have running LAMP stack skip this step else use the following commands to install it.

Install PHP

Let’s start with the installation of PHP 5.6 or higher version on your Debian 10 Buster Linux system.

wget -q https://packages.sury.org/php/apt.gpg -O- | sudo apt-key add -
sudo echo "deb https://packages.sury.org/php/ buster main" | tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/php.list

sudo apt update
sudo apt install php-gd php-curl php-zip php-dom php-xml php-simplexml php-mbstring php-intl php-json

Install Apache2

sudo apt-get install -y apache2 libapache2-mod-php

Install MySQL

sudo apt-get install -y mysql-server php-mysql

Step 2 – Download ownCloud Source

After successfully configuring lamp server on your system, Let’s download latest ownCloud from its official website.

cd /tmp
wget https://download.owncloud.org/community/owncloud-10.4.0.tar.bz2

Now extract downloaded archive under website document root and setup appropriate permissions on files and directories.

cd /var/www/html
sudo tar xjf /tmp/owncloud-10.4.0.tar.bz2
sudo chown -R www-data:www-data owncloud
sudo chmod -R 755 owncloud

Now, remove the archive file.

sudo rm -f /tmp/owncloud-10.4.0.tar.bz2

Step 3 – Create MySQL Database and User

After extracting code, let’s create a MySQL database and user account for configuring ownCloud. Use following set of command to login to MySQL server and create database and user.

mysql -u root -p
Enter password:

mysql> CREATE DATABASE owncloud;
mysql> GRANT ALL ON owncloud.* to 'owncloud'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY '_password_';
mysql> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
mysql> quit

Step 4 – Install ownCloud with Web Installer

Now access the ownCloud directory on a web browser as below. Change localhost to your server IP address or domain name.

 http://localhost/owncloud/

Enter new admin credentials to create an admin account and provide the location of the data folder.

Now slide your page down and input the database credentials and click on Finish Setup.

After completing setup you will get the admin dashboard. Where you can create a user, groups, assigned them permissions, etc.

Conclusion

Congratulations, You have a working ownCloud instance on your Debian 10 Buster Linux system.