Apps management
Nextcloud apps can enhance, customize or even restrict the features and experience you and your users has with the Nextcloud server. Next to default enabled functions like Files, Activity and Photos there are other apps like Calendar, Contacts, Talk and more which are enhancing the features of your Nextcloud server.
After installing the Nextcloud server, you might want to consider about enabling, disabling or even restricting some apps to groups depending on your and your users’ needs.
Apps
During the Nextcloud server installation, some apps are enabled by default. To see which apps are enabled go to your Apps page.
Those apps are supported and developed by Nextcloud GmbH directly and have an Featured-tag. See Supported apps for a list of supported apps.
Note
Your Nextcloud server needs to be able to communicate with
https://apps.nextcloud.com
to list and download apps. Please make sure to whitelist this target in your firewall or proxy if necessary.
Note
To get access to work-arounds, long-term-support, priority bug fixing and custom consulting for supported apps, contact our sales team.
Note
If you would like to develop your own Nextcloud app, you can find out more information in our developer manual.
All apps must be licensed under AGPLv3+ or any compatible license.
Managing apps
You will see which apps are enabled, disabled and available. You’ll also see additional app bundles and filters, such as Customization, Security and Monitoring for finding more apps quickly.
In the Apps page you can enable or disable applications. Some apps have
configurable options on the Apps page, such as Enable only for specific
groups, but mainly they are enabled or disabled here, and are configured in
your Nextcloud settings (admin and/or user-settings) or in the config.php
.
Click the app name to view a description of the app and any of the app settings in the Application View field. Clicking the Enable button will enable the app. If the app is not part of the Nextcloud installation, it will be downloaded from the app store, installed and enabled.
App updates will also be offered to you on this page. Simply click on the Update button to update a specific app or use the Update all button on top of the page to update all apps.
Note
Beta releases: You can also install beta releases of apps directly from here by switching your Nextcloud to the beta channel in the admin overview.
Update notifications
The always installed updatenotification
app allows administrators to be notified on available app and Nextcloud updates.
Moreover, since Nextcloud 29, this app also allows to notify users about updated apps and the changes that are included in the update.
This notification is enabled by default if the app provides a changelog.
To disable user notifications use:
occ config:app:set --type boolean --value="false" updatenotification app_updated.enabled
By default guest users, when using the guests app, are not notified, to enable notifications also for them use:
occ config:app:set --type boolean --value="true" updatenotification app_updated.notify_guests
Using private API
If private API, rather than the public APIs are used in a third-party app, the
installation fails, if 'appcodechecker' => true,
is set in config.php
.
Using custom app directories
Use the apps_paths array in config.php
to set any custom apps directory
locations. The key path defines the absolute file system path to the app
folder. The key url defines the HTTP web path to that folder, starting at
the Nextcloud web root. The key writable indicates if a user can install apps
in that folder.
Example: To ensure that the default /apps/
folder only contains apps shipped
with Nextcloud, follow this example to setup an /extra-apps/
folder
which will be used to store any additional apps you install:
"apps_paths" => [
[
"path" => OC::$SERVERROOT . "/apps",
"url" => "/apps",
"writable" => false,
],
[
"path" => OC::$SERVERROOT . "/extra-apps",
"url" => "/extra-apps",
"writable" => true,
],
],
Danger
Make sure that the values you choose for path
and url
for any custom
apps directories do not conflict with directories which already exist in your Nextcloud
Server root (installation directory).
Tip
Apps paths can be located outside the server root. However, for any
path outside the server root, you need to create a symbolic link in the server
root that points url to path. For instance, if path is
/var/local/lib/nextcloud/extra-apps
, and url is /extra-apps
, then
you would use the command ln
to create the symbolic link like this:
ln -sf /var/local/lib/nextcloud/extra-apps ./extra-apps
Using a self hosted apps store
Enables the installation of apps from a self hosted apps store. Requires that at least one of the configured apps directories is writeable.
To enable a self hosted apps store:
Set the appstoreenabled parameter to “true”.
This parameter is used to enable the apps store in Nextcloud.
Set the appstoreurl to the URL of your Nextcloud apps store.
This parameter is used to set the http path to your self hosted Nextcloud apps store.
"appstoreenabled" => true,
"appstoreurl" => "https://my.appstore.instance/v1",
By default the apps store is enabled and configured to use https://apps.nextcloud.com/api/v1
as apps store url. Nextcloud will fetch apps.json
and categories.json
from there. To use the defaults again remove appstoreenabled and appstoreurl from the configuration.
Example: If categories.json
is available at https://apps.nextcloud.com/api/v1/categories.json
the apps store url is https://apps.nextcloud.com/api/v1
.