8 Killer Apps for Nextcloud on Raspberry Pi

Self-hosting web sites and providers on a Raspberry Pi at residence is a superb interest and reduces your reliance on surveillance promoting corporations comparable to Google and Facebook. If you make money working from home or run a enterprise, Nextcloud, and its app integrations, present virtually the whole lot you must choose out of huge tech solely.

What Is Nextcloud, and Why Install It on Your Raspberry Pi?

At its core, Nextcloud is a free and open supply self-hosted drop-in alternative for cloud storage suppliers. It has an identical performance to Dropbox, Google Drive, or Microsoft’s OneDrive. One key distinction is you can host it on your individual {hardware}—maintaining it safely away from prying eyes, content material insurance policies, trackers, and advertisers.

Nextcloud is easy to install, and runs on very low-end techniques. On a Raspberry Pi 4B, even computationally intensive processes run properly—though when you have greater than a handful of customers, it is best to most likely think about beefier {hardware}. You can entry your Nextcloud occasion on your desktop through WebDAV, via a browser, or with devoted cellular apps.

Nextcloud’s magnificence lies in its extensibility. You can broaden its capabilities by means of built-in apps which might add the whole lot from streaming music gamers and radio station managers to social networks and shared price range managers. All apps could be put in inside your individual occasion. Here are among the greatest…

1. Collabora Online Office Suite

Collaborative doc creation has been revolutionary for freelancers and distant employees. You can write an article, draw up a spreadsheet, or put together a presentation, then have others —in numerous elements of the world— view, edit, and publish it.

Google Docs has dominated on this discipline since its launch in 2006, however the Collabora Online app in Nextcloud is simply pretty much as good. Any consumer on your Nextcloud occasion can work on paperwork and shows collectively, and you’ll share hyperlinks with non-users too. Installing the package deal requires you to put in each the Collabora Online app itself, and the ARM64 model of CODE server.

You may edit your paperwork on-the-go with the Collabora Office app from the Android and iOS retailer.

2. Cookbook

Everyone loves meals, however discovering recipes is a chore, and wading via a 3,000-word essay earlier than you even get to the substances is painful.

Cookbook is Nextcloud’s recipe supervisor, and lets you retailer and entry your recipes immediately, with a quick description, substances, step-by-step directions, and cooking time. Even higher, in case you enter the URL of a recipe web page written within the virtually ubiquitous Recipe Schema Markup, Cookbook will retrieve all the mandatory info and format it for you. Nextcloud Cookbook is a vital for any kitchen pill; all you must do is find some good recipes!

3. Nextcloud Talk for Chats and Video Conferencing

Video conferencing has turn out to be more and more important over the previous a number of years, and has virtually solely negated the necessity to bodily get to an workplace. The large gamers in video conferencing have been Skype, Zoom, and Google, But Nextcloud Talk on Raspberry Pi means that you can run your individual in-house video conferencing platform.

In addition to supporting a number of simultaneous customers, you possibly can share screens, go notes to fellow attendees, and invite folks from exterior your Nextcloud occasion.

4. Nextcloud News

Catching up on information is a vital a part of the working day, and among the best methods of doing that is through RSS (Really Simple Syndication). Nextcloud News is an RSS app which might fetch normal RSS feeds and, in lots of instances, pull the total article from the unique website with no extra configuration by the consumer. It’s not fairly as absolutely featured as FreshRSS on Raspberry Pi, but it surely’s super-easy to make use of, and has a wise structure.

5. Deck for Project Management

Working in a distributed group could be exhausting. You cannot simply shout throughout the workplace to seek out out who’s presupposed to be doing what, and when it is due by. Deck is a Kanban-style app, with which you’ll be able to create boards and lists. Assign tagged duties to folks, and set due dates.

Deck is a worthy different to hosted challenge administration providers comparable to Monday and Asana, and must be in each enterprise’s toolkit. If you are simply utilizing Nextcloud at residence, Nextcloud Deck could be helpful for assigning and maintaining monitor of chores.

6. Webmail Front Ends

Whether you employ Gmail, a piece e-mail handle, or have set up your own Raspberry Pi email server, you need to use a number of accounts with out ever leaving your Nextcloud occasion.

Rainloop is a straightforward, trendy and quick web-based e-mail consumer with nice appears to be like, whereas Nextcloud mail integrates extraordinarily properly with different Nextcloud apps, comparable to Contacts, Calendar, and Files. Both help spam filtering and a number of e-mail accounts.

7. Maps

Maps are enjoyable and helpful. They gas the creativeness and encourage you to journey. But dependence on Google location providers is anathema to folks struggling to interrupt free of huge tech. Nextcloud Maps offers you the world, or a minimum of a map of it. Route technology requires a separate Open Source Routing Machine (OSRM) server to be linked—don’t be concerned although, you may also set up this on your Raspberry Pi.

Nextcloud Maps does precisely what you’ll anticipate it to, and can even monitor your cellphone if it has the Nextcloud cellular app put in. The newest model of Maps provides collaborative route planning between customers.

Other nice map-related Nextcloud apps embrace GpxPod (which lets you show, analyze, evaluate, and share GPS monitor information), GPXedit, and GPXmotion.

8. Reader

Who would not like stress-free with guide? Nobody, that is who. Nextcloud reader permits you to entry your library wherever you might be, with help for the frequent EPUB normal in addition to PDF, and each CBR and CBZ for comedian books. You can navigate via books with the keyboard in addition to mouse or contact navigation. Reader will even generate a visible index of all pages.

Nextcloud on a Raspberry Pi Can Be Anything You Want It to Be

These apps showcase solely a small portion of what Nextcloud can do, and there is a good motive that Nextcloud is the primary (and typically solely) factor that Raspberry Pi self-hosters set up. It’s the right companion for small companies and for privacy-minded people. Think about all the net providers you employ: no matter it’s, there is a good probability that there is a Nextcloud app which might change it.