User management

On the User management page of your Nextcloud Web UI you can:

Create new users
View all of your users in a single scrolling window
Filter users by group
See what groups they belong to
Edit their full names and passwords
See their data storage locations
View and set quotas
Create and edit their email addresses
Send an automatic email notification to new users
Disable and Enable users
Delete them with a single click

The default view displays basic information about your users.

The Group filters on the left sidebar lets you quickly filter users by their group memberships, and create new groups.

Click the gear icon on the lower left sidebar to set a default storage quota, and to display additional fields: Show storage location, Show last log in, Show user backend, Send email to new users, and Show email address.

User accounts have the following properties:

Login Name (Username): The unique ID of a Nextcloud user, and it cannot be changed.
Full Name: The user’s display name that appears on file shares, the Nextcloud Web interface, and emails. Admins and users may change the Full Name anytime. If the Full Name is not set it defaults to the login name.
Password: The admin sets the new user’s first password. Both the user and the admin can change the user’s password at anytime.
Email address: You can set an email address for a user. This address can be used when you first set-up an account so the user receive a mail asking them to create a password if none is provided. This address can be used for password reset request.
Groups: You may create groups, and assign group memberships to users. By default new users are not assigned to any groups.
Group Admin: Group admins are granted administrative privileges on specific groups, and can add and remove users from their groups. This means they can modify the username, password, email, quota, etc. of members of the group.
Quota: The maximum disk space assigned to each user. Any user that exceeds the quota cannot upload or sync data. You have the the option to include external storage in user quotas.
Manager: Every user can have one organizational manager. The manager property goes into the system address book card of the user and is used for the Contacts app’s organization chart, for example. Setting a manager does not change any authorization level of the user or their manager.

Creating a new user

To create a user account:

Enter the new user’s Login Name and their initial Password
Optionally, assign Groups memberships
Click the Create button

Login names may contain letters (a-z, A-Z), numbers (0-9), dashes (-), underscores (_), periods (.), spaces ( ) and at signs (@). After creating the user, you may fill in their Full Name if it is different than the login name, or leave it for the user to complete.

If you have checked Send email to new user in the control panel on the lower left sidebar, you may also enter the new user’s email address, and Nextcloud will automatically send them a notification with their new login information. You may edit this email using the email template editor on your Admin page (see Email).

Set the Send email to new user-checkbox allows you to leave the Password field empty. The user will get an activation-email to set their own password.

Reset a user’s password

You cannot recover a user’s password, but you can set a new one:

Hover your cursor over the user’s Password field
Click on the pencil icon
Enter the user’s new password in the password field, and remember to provide the user with their password

If you have encryption enabled, there are special considerations for user password resets. Please see Encryption configuration.

Renaming a user

Each Nextcloud user has two names: a unique Login Name used for authentication, and a Full Name, which is their display name. You can edit the display name of a user, but you cannot change the login name of any user.

To set or change a user’s display name:

Hover your cursor over the user’s Full Name field
Click on the Pencil icon
Enter the user’s new display name

Granting administrator privileges to a user

Nextcloud has two types of administrators: Super Administrators and Group Administrators. Group administrators have the rights to create, edit and delete users in their assigned groups. Group administrators cannot access system settings, or add or modify users in the groups that they are not Group Administrators for. Use the dropdown menus in the Group Admin column to assign group admin privileges.

Super Administrators have full rights on your Nextcloud server, and can access and modify all settings. To assign the Super Administrators role to a user, simply add them to the admin group.

Managing groups

You can assign new users to groups when you create them, and create new groups when you create new users. You may also use the Add Group button at the top of the left pane to create new groups. New group members will immediately have access to file shares that belong to their new groups.

Setting Storage quotas

Click the gear on the lower left pane to set a default storage quota. This is automatically applied to new users. You may assign a different quota to any user by selecting from the Quota dropdown, selecting either a preset value or entering a custom value. When you create custom quotas, use the normal abbreviations for your storage values such as 500 MB, 5 GB, 5 TB, and so on.

You now have a configurable option in config.php that controls whether external storage is counted against user’s quotas. This is still experimental, and may not work as expected. The default is to not count external storage as part of user storage quotas. If you prefer to include it, then change the default false to true.

'quota_include_external_storage' => false,

Note

If an external storage is defined as root, the quota will not be calculable and will be ignored.

Metadata (such as thumbnails, temporary files, and encryption keys) takes up about 10% of disk space, but is not counted against user quotas. Users can check their used and available space on their Personal pages. Only files that originate with users count against their quotas, and not files shared with them that originate from other users. For example, if you upload files to a different user’s share, those files count against your quota. If you re-share a file that another user shared with you, that file does not count against your quota, but the originating user’s.

Encrypted files are a little larger than unencrypted files; the unencrypted size is calculated against the user’s quota.

Deleted files that are still in the trash bin do not count against quotas. The trash bin is set at 50% of quota. Deleted file aging is set at 30 days. When deleted files exceed 50% of quota then the oldest files are removed until the total is below 50%.

When version control is enabled, the older file versions are not counted against quotas.

When a user creates a public share via URL, and allows uploads, any uploaded files count against that user’s quota.

Disable and enable users

Sometimes you may want to disable a user without permanently deleting their settings and files. The user can be activated any time again, without data-loss.

Hover your cursor over their name on the Users page until the “…”-menu icon appears at the far right. After clicking on it, you will see the Disable option.

The user will not longer be able to access their Nextcloud until you enable them again. Also all external shares, via public link or email, will not be accessible. Internal shares will still be working, so that other users on Nextcloud can continue working.

If you wish for internal shares to be disabled as well when a user is disabled, activate the configuration option files_sharing:hide_disabled_user_shares:

occ config:app:set files_sharing hide_disabled_user_shares --value yes

You will find all disabled users in the disabled-section on the left pane. Enabling users is as easy as disabling them. Just click on the “…”-menu, and select Enable.

Deleting users

Deleting a user is easy: hover your cursor over their name on the Users page until the “…”-menu icon appears at the far right. After clicking on it, you will see the Delete option. Clicking on it, deletes a user with all their data immediately.

You’ll see an undo button at the top of the page, which remains for some seconds. When the undo button is gone you cannot recover the deleted user.

All of the files owned by the user are deleted as well, including all files they have shared. If you need to preserve the user’s files and shares, you must first download them from your Nextcloud Files page, which compresses them into a zip file, or use a sync client to copy them to your local computer. See File Sharing to learn how to create persistent file shares that survive user deletions.