Configuring Object Storage as Primary Storage

Nextcloud allows to configure object storages like OpenStack Swift or Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) or any compatible S3-implementation (e.g. Minio or Ceph Object Gateway) as primary storage replacing the default storage of files.

By default, files are stored in nextcloud/data or another directory configured in the config.php of your Nextcloud instance. This data directory might still be used for compatibility reasons)

Implications

When using an object store as primary storage, Nextcloud assumes exclusive access over the bucket being used.

Contrary to using an object store as external storage, when an object store is used as primary storage, no metadata (names, directory structures, etc) is stored in the object store. The metadata is only stored in the database and the object store only holds the file content by unique identifier.

Because of this primary object stores usually perform better than when using the same object store as external storage but it restricts being able to access the files from outside of Nextcloud.

Configuration

Primary object stores need to be configured in config.php by specifying the objectstore backend and any backend specific configuration.

Note

Configuring a primary object store on an existing Nextcloud instance will make all existing files on the instance inaccessible.

The configuration has the following structure:

'objectstore' => array(
        'class' => 'Object\\Storage\\Backend\\Class',
        'arguments' => array(
                ...
        ),
),

OpenStack Swift

The OpenStack Swift backend mounts a container on an OpenStack Object Storage server into the virtual filesystem.

The class to be used is \\OC\\Files\\ObjectStore\\Swift

'objectstore' => array(
        'class' => '\\OC\\Files\\ObjectStore\\Swift',
        'arguments' => array(
                'username' => 'username',
                'password' => 'Secr3tPaSSWoRdt7',
                // the container to store the data in
                'bucket' => 'nextcloud',
                'autocreate' => true,
                'region' => 'RegionOne',
                // The Identity / Keystone endpoint
                'url' => 'http://example.com/v2.0',
                // optional on some swift implementations
                'tenantName' => 'username',
                'serviceName' => 'swift',
                // The Interface / url Type, optional
                'urlType' => 'internal'
        ),
),

Simple Storage Service (S3)

The simple storage service (S3) backend mounts a bucket on an Amazon S3 object storage or compatible implementation (e.g. Minio or Ceph Object Gateway) into the virtual filesystem.

The class to be used is \\OC\\Files\\ObjectStore\\S3

'objectstore' => array(
        'class' => '\\OC\\Files\\ObjectStore\\S3',
        'arguments' => array(
                'bucket' => 'nextcloud',
                'autocreate' => true,
                'key'    => 'EJ39ITYZEUH5BGWDRUFY',
                'secret' => 'M5MrXTRjkyMaxXPe2FRXMTfTfbKEnZCu+7uRTVSj',
                'hostname' => 'example.com',
                'port' => 1234,
                'use_ssl' => true,
                'region' => 'optional',
                // required for some non Amazon S3 implementations
                'use_path_style'=>true
        ),
),

Note

Not all configuration options are required for all S3 servers. Overriding the hostname, port and region of your S3 server is only required for non-Amazon implementations, which in turn usually don’t require the region to be set.

Note

use_path_style is usually not required (and is, in fact, incompatible with newer Amazon datacenters), but can be used with non-Amazon servers where the DNS infrastructure cannot be controlled. Ordinarily, requests will be made with http://bucket.hostname.domain/, but with path style enabled, requests are made with http://hostname.domain/bucket instead.

Multibucket Object Store

It’s possible to configure Nextcloud to distribute its data over multiple buckets for scalability purpose. You can find out more information about upscaling with object storage and Nextcloud in the Nextcloud customer portal.