Nextcloud + Raspberry Pi + Docker + Onion service = 🔥

Published in

ITNEXT

2 min readJul 7, 2020

A couple months ago, I had this idea to setup a private Nextcloud instance to share files with friends, have a group agenda and more collaborative stuff.

For privacy concerns and to avoid paying a domain name, I thought of hosting this instance as a Tor hidden service.

I started asking around for hosting solutions, prices and privacy policies. After a couple weeks of unsuccessful findings, I stumbled upon this Reddit thread suggesting hosting a Nextcloud instance on a Raspberry Pi. Why haven’t I thought of this earlier ?!

(a beautiful Raspberry Pi 4 in its raspberry colored case ❤)

I ordered a Raspberry Pi Starter Kit with a brand new Raspberry Pi 4 Model B (4GB memory). While I waited for the package, I found this GitHub repo. I used Docker to setup the Nextcloud instance along with MariaDb, all that behind an onion service. The docker-compose.yamllooked like this :

version: '3'services:
  onionize:
    image: torservers/onionize
    volumes:
      - /var/run/docker.sock:/tmp/docker.sock:ro
    networks:
      - faraday  nextcloud:
    image: nextcloud:apache
    environment:
      - ONIONSERVICE_NAME=app
    networks:
      - faraday
    depends_on:
      - db
    volumes:
      - nextcloud:/var/www/html
      - ./app/config:/var/www/html/config
      - ./app/custom_apps:/var/www/html/custom_apps
      - ./app/data:/var/www/html/data
      - ./app/themes:/var/www/html/themes
      - /etc/localtime:/etc/localtime:ro
    restart: unless-stopped  db:
    image: mariadb
    networks:
      - faraday
    volumes:
      - db:/var/lib/mysql
      - /etc/localtime:/etc/localtime:ro
    environment:
      - MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD=password
      - MYSQL_PASSWORD=mysql
      - MYSQL_DATABASE=nextcloud
      - MYSQL_USER=nextcloud
    restart: unless-stoppedvolumes:
  nextcloud:
  db:networks:
  faraday:
    driver: bridge

Everything was working fine on my laptop, so I waited. Upon receiving the Raspberry, I installed Raspbian Lite and set SSH up. Next, I installed git, docker, docker-compose and added external storage.

docker-compose up and… nope. The nextcloudand dbservices startup correctly but onionizeexits with an error. It was working fine on my laptop, why not on the Raspberry ?!

The architecture of the docker imagetorservers/onionize:latestis amd64and Raspberry Pi 4 has an armhfarchitecture ! I did some research and discovered a recent tool developed by the Docker team : buildx

buildxallows to build images for specific processor architectures such as amd64 or amrhf. I forked torservers/onionize, changed the architecture of docker-genin the Dockerfile and used buildx to create an armhfcompatible image.

Example here : https://medium.com/@artur.klauser/building-multi-architecture-docker-images-with-buildx-27d80f7e2408

Containers have now been up for a week, Nextcloud works great, response time through the Tor network is pretty fast !

My Github repo : https://github.com/rriclet/tor-cloud

Nextcloud + Raspberry Pi + Docker + Onion service = 🔥

Written by Robin Riclet