At first, please update your centos. Every command I use, is used as root 😉

yum -y update

Installing database server MariaDB

Next, we install and create empty database for our nextcloud. Then we start it and enable for autostart after boot.
If you wish, you can skip installations of MariaDB and you can use built-in SQLite. Then you can continue with installing apache web server.

yum -y install mariadb mariadb-server
...
systemctl start mariadb
systemctl enable mariadb

Now, we run post installation script to finish setting up mariaDB server:

mysql_secure_installation
...
Enter current password for root (enter for none): ENTER
Set root password? [Y/n] Y
Remove anonymous users? [Y/n] Y
Disallow root login remotely? [Y/n] Y
Remove test database and access to it? [Y/n] Y
Reload privilege tables now? [Y/n] Y

Now, we can create a database for nextcloud.

mysql -u root -p
...
CREATE DATABASE nextcloud;
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON nextcloud.* TO 'nextclouduser'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'YOURPASSWORD';
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
exit;

Installing Apache Web Server with ssl (letsencrypt)

Now, we install Apache web server, and we start it and enable for autostart after boot:

yum install httpd -y
systemctl start httpd.service
systemctl enable httpd.service

Now, we install ssl for apache and allow https service for firewall:

yum -y install epel-release
yum -y install httpd mod_ssl
...
firewall-cmd --zone=public --permanent --add-service=https
firewall-cmd --zone=public --permanent --add-service=http
firewall-cmd --reload
systemctl restart httpd.service
systemctl status httpd

Now we can access our server via https://out.server.sk
If we want signed certificate from letsencrypt, we can do it with next commands. Certboot will ask some questions, so answer them.

yum -y install python-certbot-apache
certbot --apache -d example.com

If we are good, we can see:

IMPORTANT NOTES:
 - Congratulations! Your certificate and chain have been saved at
   /etc/letsencrypt/live/example.com/fullchain.pem.
...

And we can test our page with this:

https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=example.com&latest

Install PHP 7

As creators of nextcloud recommends at minimal PHP 5.4, I use php 7.
PHP 5.4 has been end-of-life since September 2015 and is no longer supported by the PHP team. RHEL 7 still ships with PHP 5.4, and Red Hat supports it. Nextcloud also supports PHP 5.4, so upgrading is not required. However, it is highly recommended to upgrade to PHP 5.5+ for best security and performance.
Now we must add some additional repositories:

rpm -Uvh https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-7.noarch.rpm
rpm -Uvh https://mirror.webtatic.com/yum/el7/webtatic-release.rpm

And we can install php 7.2:

yum install mod_php72w.x86_64 php72w-common.x86_64 php72w-gd.x86_64 php72w-intl.x86_64 php72w-mysql.x86_64 php72w-xml.x86_64 php72w-mbstring.x86_64 php72w-cli.x86_64 php72w-process.x86_64

Check in:

php --ini |grep Loaded
Loaded Configuration File:         /etc/php.ini
php -v
PHP 7.2.22 (cli) (built: Sep 11 2019 18:11:52) ( NTS )
Copyright (c) 1997-2018 The PHP Group
Zend Engine v3.2.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2018 Zend Technologies

In my case, I will use nextcloud as my backup device, so I increase the default upload limit to 200MB.

sed -i "s/post_max_size = 8M/post_max_size = 200M/" /etc/php.ini
sed -i "s/upload_max_filesize = 2M/upload_max_filesize = 200M/" /etc/php.ini
sed -i "s/memory_limit = 128M/memory_limit = 512M/" /etc/php.ini

Restart web server:

systemctl restart httpd

Installing Nextcloud

At first, I install wget tool for download and unzip:

 yum -y install wget unzip

Now we can download nextcloud (at this time the latest version is 16.0.4). And extract it from archive to final destination. Then we change ownership of this directory:

wget https://download.nextcloud.com/server/releases/nextcloud-16.0.4.zip
...
unzip nextcloud-16.0.4.zip -d /var/www/html/
...
chown -R apache:apache /var/www/html/nextcloud/

Check, if you have enabled SELinux by command sestatus:

sestatus 

SELinux status:                 enabled
SELinuxfs mount:                /sys/fs/selinux
SELinux root directory:         /etc/selinux
Loaded policy name:             targeted
Current mode:                   enforcing
Mode from config file:          enforcing
Policy MLS status:              enabled
Policy deny_unknown status:     allowed
Max kernel policy version:      31

Refer to nextcloud admin manual, you can run into permissions problems. Run these commands as root to adjust permissions:

semanage fcontext -a -t httpd_sys_rw_content_t '/var/www/html/nextcloud/data(/.*)?'
semanage fcontext -a -t httpd_sys_rw_content_t '/var/www/html/nextcloud/config(/.*)?'
semanage fcontext -a -t httpd_sys_rw_content_t '/var/www/html/nextcloud/apps(/.*)?'
semanage fcontext -a -t httpd_sys_rw_content_t '/var/www/html/nextcloud/.htaccess'
semanage fcontext -a -t httpd_sys_rw_content_t '/var/www/html/nextcloud/.user.ini'
restorecon -Rv '/var/www/html/nextcloud/'

If you see error “-bash: semanage: command not found”, install packages:

yum provides /usr/sbin/semanage

yum install policycoreutils-python-2.5-33.el7.x86_64

And finally, we can access our nextcloud and set up administrators password via our web: https://you-ip/nextcloud
Now you must complete the installation via web interface. Set Administrator’s password and locate to MariaDB with used credentials:

Database user: nextclouduser
Database password: YOURPASSWORD
Database name: nextcloud
host: localhost

In my case, I must create a DATA folder under out nextcloud and set permissions:

mkdir /var/www/html/nextcloud/data
chown apache:apache /var/www/html/nextcloud/data -R
semanage fcontext -a -t httpd_sys_rw_content_t '/var/www/html/nextcloud/data(/.*)?'
restorecon -Rv '/var/www/html/nextcloud/'

For easier access, I created a permanent redirect for my IP/domain Nextcloud root folder. This redirect allow you to open page

https://your-ip

and redirect you to:

https://your-ip/nextcloud

You must edit httpd.conf file and add this line into directory /var/www/html:

vim /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf
...
RedirectMatch ^/$ https://your-ip/nextcloud
...
systemctl restart httpd.service

If we see an error like “Your data directory and files are probably accessible from the Internet. The .htaccess file is not working. ” try edit and change variable

vim /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf
....
<Directory "/var/www/html">
    AllowOverride All
    Require all granted
    Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
</Directory>

Enable updates via the web interface

To enable updates via the web interface, you may need this to enable writing to the directories:

setsebool httpd_unified on

When the update is completed, disable write access:

setsebool -P httpd_unified off

setsebool -P  httpd_unified  off

vim  /etc/httpd/conf.d/owncloud.conf
...
Alias /nextcloud "/var/www/html/nextcloud/"
<Directory /var/www/html/nextcloud/>
  Options +FollowSymlinks
  AllowOverride All
 <IfModule mod_dav.c>
  Dav off
 </IfModule>
 SetEnv HOME /var/www/html/nextcloud
 SetEnv HTTP_HOME /var/www/html/nextcloud
</Directory>