Goodbye MySQL!

ownCloud's switch to gRPC and microservices eliminates the need for a relational database. Instead, components in oCIS required to store metadata will do that on their own. With Reva and no MySQL dependencies, the complexity of running ownCloud in small environments is reduced considerably – a point interesting not just to large-scale data center admins.

Up and Running

ownCloud published a technical preview of oCIS 1.0 at the end of 2020, shipping it as a Docker container and binaries. More examples on getting it running are linked in the deployment section of the GitHub repository.

The vendor's claim that getting the oCIS Docker container up and running is easy, is true, although things get complicated with EOS (see below). Docker images for oCIS are available on Docker Hub [10]; their latest tag always reflects the current master branch.

Any standard virtual machine with one of the big cloud providers or any entry server in the data center with a standard Linux distribution should be sufficient, provided the system has a container runtime installed. On openSUSE, for example,

zypper in docker

provides the needed container. One or both commands

service docker enable
service docker start

create the standard Docker environment.

Pulling the oCIS container and starting it is all that is required to get the server and ownCloud Web up and running with the default usernames (Figure 1):

# zypper in docker
# service docker start
# docker pull owncloud/ocis
# docker run --rm -ti -p 9200:9200 owncloud/ocis

Figure 1: The oCIS login window after downloading and starting the Docker image.

That's it. oCIS is now at your service on localhost, port 9200 (http://localhost:9200 ). The demo accounts and passwords are einstein :relativity , marie :radioactivity , and richard :superfluidity . Admin accounts are moss :vista and admin :admin . If oCIS is run on a server with a resolvable hostname, it can request an SSL certificate from Let's Encrypt via Traefik.

oCIS Binary

An alternative to Docker is a pre-compiled binary that users – thanks to Go – can simply download from GitHub. The latest binaries from the master branch are in the testing section. Listing 1 downloads oCIS from the ownCloud download repository.

# for Mac
curl https://download.owncloud.com/ocis/ocis/1.0.0/ocis-1.0.0-darwin-amd64 --output ocis
# for Linux
curl https://download.owncloud.com/ocis/ocis/1.0.0/ocis-1.0.0-linux-amd64 --output ocis
chmod +x ocis

The binary edition of oCIS expects /var/tmp/ocis as the default storage location, but that can be changed in its configuration (Figure 2). The server can be started with ./ocis server. Basic management and extension commands are shown in Table 1. If the exit code of the health check equals zero, the service should be up and running. If the exit code is greater than zero, the service is not in a healthy state. The oCIS binary already contains some extensions that can be managed by oCIS commands.

Figure 2: User management interface in the oCIS test machine.

Figure 3: ownCloud supplies an overwhelming amount of documentation, especially when considering it is still a technology preview.