falstaff – yet another tech blog

ownCloud is a great piece of open source software. It allows you to share files easily like Dropbox or Google Drive (including fancy drag and drop upload on newer browsers), but gives you the control of your data, since you can host an instance yourself!

My goal was to test the latest ownCloud 5 snapshot from Github. I do have SSH access on destination server, so my goal was to deploy it directly using Git. Be warned: The master branch from Github can (and will) contain bugs! But you get bleeding edge and you can help testing the software. 

The instructions provided in the Getting Started chapter of the Developer Manual are a good start. I used slightly different commands since under Ubuntu the Apache runs under www-data. Also I use the group permissions to give the Apache server access and left myself as owner, this allows me to run git commands as my user while maintain access for the Webserver:

cd /var/www
git clone https://github.com/owncloud/core.git owncloud
cd owncloud
git clone https://github.com/owncloud/apps.git apps
git clone https://github.com/owncloud/3rdparty.git 3rdparty
sudo mkdir config
sudo mkdir data
sudo chgrp www-data owncloud/config
sudo chgrp www-data owncloud/data
sudo chgrp www-data owncloud/apps

Now you can start using ownCloud from the web. Point your browser at http://yourhost.tld/owncloud which should show you a form to create an administration account.

A simple “git pull” will update your installation to the latest source snapshot from Github. To upgrade 3rdparty and apps directory you need to issue an “git pull” command in those directories too.