Mount your Nextcloud account as a catalogue in Linux

January 10, 2020

In the last couple of month, I have not been able to sync my pretty huge library in Nextcloud due to a bug that is being ignored in the Nextcloud client. But I still need to sync my files – what to do?

It has been a source of frustration to not be able to sync down my files during this fall, so I started to look at other solutions instead, like DavFS2. With DavFS2 you can mount your Nextcloud account like you mount a HDD/SSD ora USB memory – simple!

First of all, you need to install the davfs2 package, on debian derivatives such as Ubuntu, MXLinux or PureOS:

sudo apt-get install davfs2

On RHEL/CentOS:

sudo yum install davfs2

On Fedora:

sudo dnf install davfs2

On SuSE:

sudo zypper install davfs2

Next, we want to modify the /etc/fstab file so the Nextcloud account will be mounted at boot, just modify the command provided to match your own setup:

echo "https://cloud.operationtulip.com/remote.php/webdav/ /mnt/nextcloud davfs _netdev,noauto,user,uid=USER,gid=GROUP 0 0" >> /etc/fstab

Also, I do strongly assume that you do not want to enter your login everytime you boot.

echo "/mnt/nextcloud NEXTCLOUDUSER NEXTCLOUDPASSWORD" >> /etc/davfs2/sercets

Let's finish this with adding your user into the davfs2 group

sudo usermod -a -G davfs2 USERNAME

Now, you should be able to mount it:

mount /mnt/nextcloud

Optional – encrypt transparently with gocryptfs

First, install the gocryptfs package:

sudo apt-get install gocryptfs

On RHEL/CentOS:

sudo yum install gocryptfs

On Fedora:

sudo dnf install gocryptfs

On SuSE:

`sudo zypper install gocryptfs

In this case, we are just going to create a catalogue in the homecatalogue, add is as a “plain” catalogue where the files is going to be shown decrypted for you and mount it against /mnt/nextcloud – so the files is going to be stored encrypted.

    mkdir -p ~/nextcloud_encrypted
    gocryptfs -init /mnt/nextcloud
    gocryptfs /mnt/nextcloud nextcloud_encrypted

Now, you can create a file in ~/nextcloud_encrypted, and it will show up as encrypted in the /mnt/nextcloud catalogue.

Happy sharing!