Removed the howto - cause it’s outdated and likely not to work anymore.
I wonder how and if the “Nextcloud snap team” are affiliated with Nextcloud. Greetings to my Bavarian neighbours anyway!
What makes me a little suspicious is that no relation to official Nextcloud is mentioned anywhere I could find it, the link shown in the Snapstore (github.com/nextcloud/nextcloud-snap) suggests an affiliation but gets redirected to github.com/nextcloud-snap/nextcloud-snap. This may all be legit, but it could also be some people’s personal fork. Which, I don’t know. Would be nice if it was clearly communicated.
This Snap variant might be nice for people using Snap and wanting to get used to what Nextcloud has to offer (a lot!), but my personal thoughts are:
- For me, Arch is not a server OS.
- I wouldn’t use Snap. Actually phasing out my Ubuntu servers against Debian, just for that reason.
- Nextcloud itself is a good thing, and I actually run my public server on Nextcloud-AIO (All-In-One). Yes, I’m lazy, too…
So the above, albeit well-done, is not for me. It might be for you.
Just my 2¢.
It’s listed under community-projects. And yes it’s not an official release.
Ah, that closes the circle! Trust level immediately increases—maybe you should note that somewhere in the GitHub or Wiki?
Thanks for clarifying!
To be clear, I am not involved in the project, I have simply written down an installation process here. 
I have my own nextcloud running since years and I can only recommend “docker” to run the nextcloud. That is by far the easiest way to get it going and to maintain it. I personally very much prefer “docker compose”. You just need one YAML file to put the image and get it started.
I would not refer to snap for such a thing.
In the end it’s all personal preference. Nobody forces you to do this or that, that’s the beauty of the linux world.
Absolutely. You are not forced to use snap 
I just wanted to mention to people reading your tutorial that with docker there is a much easier way to get a nextcloud installed and maintained even on a rolling release distro like arch. And this includes also a nginx reverse proxy with let’s encrpyt certificate.
Once you have docker installed you could use it for other stuff too. Like pihole dns server, jellyfin media server, etc.
But I do not want to hijack your thread. Sorry for that.
You’re free to post, this thread is open to the public. Constructive criticism is highly welcome. Perhaps you can give some details what ist hard to maintain on a snap package? I’m interested in learning new stuff and alternatives.
And yes I’m aware that snap isn’t everybodies darling 
especially outside the Ubuntu circle.
I started my nextcloud journey by installing nextcloud from scratch. Including apache, php, nextcloud, redis, php-fpm, etc. This worked but it was prone for breakage because arch is a rolling release and nextcloud was breaking every now and then because php, apache, etc was updated.
Then I started to use virtualbox/vmware to run a debian server with nextcloud. But in the end that was too complicated and to resouce hungry. Then I started to use docker. I had no experience with it, had to learn some, but I am not looking back. It is great.
There is a fundamental difference between snapd and docker. docker containers are completely isolated from the host system. snaps are excecuted in a sandbox environment which has moderate access to the host system. Therefore snap is more a package manager while docker is a real container environment.
Secondly, snapd is under control of ubuntu and so are all the snaps. The docker image for nextcloud on the other hand is officially provided. Nextcloud GmbH maintains an all-in-one docker immage (AIO):
Thirdly, with docker I have also nginx-proxy-manager installed which puts all my outside services (nextcloud, jellyfin) behind https with let’s encrypt certificates. Again, very easy with zero impact to my host system.
The initial start is very easy:
- Install docker and configure the storage location
- Create / Download the docker-compose.yaml file for nextcloud
- docker compose pull -f /path/to/docker-compose.yaml
- docker compose up -d -f /path/to/docker-compose.yaml
and if you want to shutdown - docker compose down -f /path/to/docker-compose.yaml
Thats it. And for even more convenience I use “portainer” to manage the docker environment.
In a nutshell: Docker is a professional solution for servers. snapd is package management for home users.
But regardless of the professionalism, docker is very easy to setup and to update the environments like nextcloud. From my point of view docker is not used as much as it should.
PS
And if you want to learn and play around with it I strongly recommend perplexity.ai as the search engine to ask questions about docker commands. perplexity helped me a lot. It looks to me as if it had special training about docker 
Well that’s a very similar experience I had in the past years , what led me to nextcloud-snap in the more recent past.
Managing the snap package isn’t much more complicated.
starting/stoping/take snapshots/restore snapshots are single-line commands.
The package also contains all the components, which are then automatically updated in a coordinated manner by the snap package maintainers. And if really needed you can perform rollbacks relatively easily.
In a nutshell: Docker is a professional solution for servers. snapd is package management for home users.
I would underline this.
Your’re absolutely right, docker definitely seems to be a much better option in a professional environment. Especially because of the stricter separation from the host system and its possibility of multiple usecases.
I personally have never felt the urge to deal with Docker in the last few years, even though I’ve heard of it. Maybe I’ll take this opportunity to tackle this now. I’ll definitely check it out.
Thank you for sharing your perspective on the matter in detail. I highly appreciate it.