Posts tagged nextcloud

How it works

• There will be a FUSE OneDrive filesystem mounted on the machine Nextcloud runs on,
• You configure filesystem-local “External storage” and point to the mountpoint of a cloud drive (in this case OneDrive),
• users connected via Nextcloud Client will have a option to sync any chosen files from the External storage as if they were Nextcloud-owned files.

Benefits

There are some benefits from connecting OneDrive to Nextcloud:

• faster cached sync than by normal straight-to OneDrive connection - files will be pushed to Nextcloud and then uploaded to Nextcloud, this will take less time than uploading straight to OneDrive because of Microsoft OneDrive rate-limiting the uploads (especially in case of larger files),
• clients of Nextcloud do not have to configure any OneDrive connection,
• you will be able to have two-way sync of your OneDrive files (currently two-way sync on the RClone side is experimental, this will use Nextcloud’s two-way sync mechanism).

Set up RClone

First You will have to set up RClone. Connect to your cloud of choice and then copy the config to a location that will be readable by a service that mounts a given cloud drive.

For OneDrive I use /usr/local/share/rclone/config/rclone.conf that is accessible only to the apache user.

The config will look something like this:

1
2
3
4
5
6

[OneDrive]
type = onedrive
region = global
token = *REDACTED*
drive_id = *REDACTED*
drive_type = personal

Mounting OneDrive

I created this helper script (in /usr/local/bin/rclone-mount.sh):

 1
 2
 3
 4
 5
 6
 7
 8
 9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32

#!/bin/sh

set -e
set -u
trap "exit 128" INT

conf_path="${1}"

local_user="${2}"
local_path="${3}"

cloud_name="${4}"
cloud_path="${5}"

log_dir="/var/log/rclone"
log_file="${log_dir}/rclone-mount-${local_user}-${cloud_name}.log"

mkdir -p "${log_dir}"
touch "${log_file}"

chmod a+r "${log_file}"
chown "${local_user}" "${log_file}"

exec rclone                                         \
     --default-permissions                          \
     --allow-other                                  \
     --verbose                                      \
     --vfs-cache-mode full                          \
     --config "${conf_path}"                        \
     mount                                          \
     "${cloud_name}:${cloud_path}" "${local_path}"  \
     >> "${log_file}" 2>&1

Then, I use it in a OpenRC service like this (/etc/init.d/mount-OneDrive):

 1
 2
 3
 4
 5
 6
 7
 8
 9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32

#!/sbin/openrc-run

conf_path="/usr/local/share/rclone/config/rclone.conf"

cloud_name="OneDrive"
cloud_path="/"

local_user="apache"
local_path="/mnt/${cloud_name}"

command="/usr/local/bin/rclone-mount.sh"
command_args="${conf_path} ${local_user} ${local_path} ${cloud_name} ${cloud_path}"

command_background="false"
command_user="${local_user}:$(id -g -n ${local_user})"
supervisor="supervise-daemon"

depend() {
    need net
}

start_pre() {
    ebegin "Unmounting leftovers from ${local_path} before service start"
    umount "${local_path}"
    eend 0
}

stop_post() {
    ebegin "Unmounting leftovers from ${local_path} after service stop"
    umount "${local_path}"
    eend 0
}

Enabling the RClone service

Set up directories and correct permissions:

1
2
3
4
5

mkdir -p /usr/local/share/rclone/config
chown -R apache:apache /usr/local/share/rclone/config

mkdir -p /var/log/rclone
chown -R apache:apache /var/log/rclone

Do not forget to make the mount service script executable:

1

chmod +x /etc/init.d/mount-OneDrive

Enable and start this service on OpenRC:

1
2

rc-update add mount-OneDrive default
rc-service mount-OneDrive start

Drive permissions

RClone mounts cloud drives by using FUSE. To have the RClone option --allow-other available in order to allow root to access the drive you will have to modify the FUSE config file (/etc/fuse.conf) - add user_allow_other.

Nextcloud configuration

Download and enable the “External storage” app. Then, in “Administration” settings add a external storage:

• name: ExternalStorage_OneDrive
• type: Local
• authentication: None
• configuration: /mnt/OneDrive
• available for: YOUR USER