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Nextcloud with Tor Tutorial

Objectives

  • Practice using ssh and Treehouses Remote
  • Practice running Docker container
  • Learn how to use Tor to remotely access your Raspberry Pi

Introduction

Nextcloud is a customizable file-storage service similar to Dropbox, or Google Drive, but hosted privately from your own Raspberry Pi. It has add-on features such as text editors, messaging services, video players, and much more. You will start up Nextcloud container with docker. By using Tor to open up the port occupied by Nextcloud, you will be able to access it without needing to be on the same Wifi network.

Prepare Treehouses image

Warning: Use a new SD Card for these steps; otherwise you will encounter errors.

Download the latest treehouses image here, then use balenaEtcher to flash the image onto your SD card.

In your file explorer, navigate to the boot drive, and open the autorunonce file in a text editor of your choice. Delete everything, and paste this in:

#!/bin/bash

treehouses rename 'username'
treehouses expandfs
treehouses button bluetooth


treehouses bridge 'wifiname' 'treehouses' 'wifipassword'

reboot

Replace username with your Github username,and replace wifiname and wifipassword with your wifi name and password that you are connecting. Save the file, and safely eject the SD card.

NOTE: You must modify the autorunonce file before using the SD card with the Raspberry Pi. Failure to do this step correctly will cause "Planet Learning" - another OLE service - to load when starting Tor. Don’t hesitate to ask other members in the Gitter chat if you are not able to load Nextcloud after attempting this step again.

Install Tor

NOTE: You can skip this section if you already installed Tor from Step 2.

macOS

You should already have Homebrew installed. You can check if it's already installed by running brew -v in your terminal. If you haven't yet installed it, run the following:

/usr/bin/ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"
brew install wget cask

Then, install Tor and Tor Browser:

brew install tor
brew cask install tor-browser

Windows & Linux

Install Tor

Start up Nextcloud

Plug the microSD into your Raspberry Pi, and power it on. The red LED should turn on, indicating that the Raspberry Pi is connected to power. Once the green LED next to it on your Raspberry Pi stabilizes into a solid green, you should see "treehouses" appear in available Wifi networks. Connect to it, and make sure that you have an internet connection by opening up another web page.

Find the Raspberry Pi's IP address in your network settings (it will probably be 192.168.2.1). Open up your terminal or command prompt, and use one of the following ways to enter the root of your Pi:

  • run ssh root@[IP address] to enter as root into your Pi using the an already placed sshkey (mostly not the case)
  • or log into the Pi user by using ssh pi@[local IP address] using the (default) password raspberry, then switchto the root user by running sudo -s or sudo -i

Run

docker run -d -p 8080:80 --name nextcloud --restart=unless-stopped nextcloud

to pull the Docker image for Nextcloud, and start up the container - this will take a few minutes. To check if the container is running, run docker ps:

root@treehouses:~# docker ps
CONTAINER ID        IMAGE               COMMAND                  CREATED             STATUS              PORTS                  NAMES
b9484a8d681e        nextcloud           "/entrypoint.sh apac…"   12 minutes ago      Up 12 minutes       0.0.0.0:8080->80/tcp   nextcloud

Now that the container has been created, you can stop and start it with docker stop nextcloud and docker start nextcloud. To view all running and stopped containers, run docker ps -a.

NOTE: If you encounter an SSH error when attempting to log into your Raspberry Pi, see FAQ #Q11 for potential solutions.

Start up Tor

As we have run Nextcloud on port 8080, that's the port that we will have to open up with Tor. While still in the root of treehouses, run treehouses tor add 80 8080, treehouses tor notice on, then treehouses tor to find the tor address. You should see something like this:

root@treehouses:~# treehouses tor add 80 8080
Success: the port has been added
root@treehouses:~# treehouses tor notice on
OK.
root@treehouses:~# treehouses tor
b3pesvpay2ouaxl556jwbknf32qlurspdregg672lgm5wjk5gejuonid.onion

To see the full list of treehouses tor commands, run treehouses help tor.

In the Tor browser on your computer, navigate to the .onion address. For instance, I would navigate to b3pesvpay2ouaxl556jwbknf32qlurspdregg672lgm5wjk5gejuonid.onion in my Tor browser. If the Nextcloud container is up and running, you should see the Nextcloud set up page:

NOTE: The Tor link may take some time to load.

Once you reach this page, send a screenshot of the window (including the URL) in the Gitter chat.

Wrap up

After you have created an admin account and logged in, you can play around with the settings, add users, install apps to augment your Nextcloud experience, and more. As long as your Raspberry Pi is connected to internet, and the Docker container is running, you will be able to access Nextcloud through the same Tor address (if you forget it, you can always ssh into your Pi and run treehouses tor).

Return to First Steps