Nextcloud cloud server — ICT171

I deployed a self-hosted Nextcloud instance on a cloud VM, containerized with Docker and served over HTTPS behind an Nginx reverse proxy. The project was built for the ICT171 course at Murdoch University.

Context

This project was part of the ICT171 course (Murdoch University, 2025). The goal was to stand up a personal cloud server running Nextcloud on a VM (droplet), with a dedicated domain name and secure HTTPS access.

The repository is mostly Shell scripts, paired with documentation covering installation, networking and backups.

Technical approach

I provisioned an Ubuntu 22.04 VM with Docker and Docker Compose, then ran Nextcloud in containers. Configuration is driven by a single .env file holding the admin and database credentials.

On the networking side, I created a DNS A record pointing cloud.alex-abriel.com to the droplet's IP and confirmed it with dig and nslookup. A containerized Nginx reverse proxy listens on port 80, issues a 301 redirect to HTTPS, and exposes the ACME /.well-known/acme-challenge/ endpoint so Let's Encrypt can issue certificates. I also documented a backup script and wrote full documentation as a PDF.

What I took away

I ran a self-hosted deployment end to end: DNS, containerization, reverse proxy and TLS all fit together as one chain I can now assemble on my own.

Writing the documentation taught me to make the setup reproducible, something I now treat as inseparable from any serious deployment.