Installing apps in Nextcloud

[jasonc]

I installed Nextcloud only to read a warning in the Cloudron support documentation that: "We do not recommend installing apps in Nextcloud unless absolutely required." https://docs.cloudron.io/apps/nextcloud/

Does that also apply to installing the OPEN OFFICE or Collabora apps with NextCloud?

It's a pity because I find nextcloud a bit limited without being able to add more of their apps.

[nebulon]

This warning is mostly there, since in our experience installing many apps will hugely increase the risk that updates break. Especially when installing not very popular nextcloud apps.

For the office connectors, they are at least tested by us during updates of collabora or onlyoffice. In fact we only have those apps for Nextcloud at the moment.

[girish]

@jasonc I had put that warning because sometimes some of our enthusiastic users install a lot of nextcloud apps. This slows down nextcloud itself and often ends up in a support ticket for us. Many times issues surface only during the next nextcloud update or nextcloud restart. Especially, things like encryption plugin etc are all very enticing to install but hard to recover from when things go wrong.

I recommend that when you install an app, just look into the app's community a bit to see how popular it is (the github repo issue tracker will give a good track record). On the other hand, if you are a very hands-on sysadmin, feel free to install away with the warning in mind. The plugins are just PHP code and as you know there is no real sandboxing of plugins. This means plugins can do all sorts of things... It's always recoverable but just time consuming. https://docs.cloudron.io/apps/nextcloud/#fixing-a-broken-install has instructions on how to fix a broken install.

[jdaviescoates]

@nebulon said in Installing apps in Nextcloud:

This warning is mostly there, since in our experience installing many apps will hugely increase the risk that updates break.

Yeah, this is the main issue.

Nextcloud never wait for Nextcloud Apps to be updated to work with new versions of Nextcloud and so very often updating to the latest version of Nextcloud will break Nextcloud Apps, or worse (but also common), old versions of Nextcloud Apps will break the new versions of Nextcloud.

Saying that, I think it's likely that must of us are using at least a handful (probably more) of Nextcloud Apps. I think using Featured ones is mostly fine.

[robi]

it sounds like they need to have a default feature added that disables plugins that have not been revved compatible with the current version.

Keep the cloud running not the 'addons'.