[HN Gopher] Opencloud - An alternative to Nextcloud written in Go
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Opencloud - An alternative to Nextcloud written in Go
Author : todsacerdoti
Score : 181 points
Date : 2025-11-08 16:40 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| roscas wrote:
| This was a nice surprise. It looks simple but it does the job. It
| allows me to put my pics and videos on my private cloud. My pdf
| also and search is fun. It allows me to create markdown docs too.
| A simple docker install and you have your private cloud. Top! It
| is not NextCloud. Nor it pretends to be. I like it, might keep
| this running and maybe put it to work. Thanks.
| teekert wrote:
| Filesystem as data backend? Does it do caldav? Carddav? Photo
| sync? A kanban board? So many questions...
|
| I am intrigued... for sure Nextcloud is too slow at times and
| too often in maintenance mode after an update (but I'm still on
| the single container!)
| dspillett wrote:
| Is there a simple list of features, and their completeness/
| maturity?
|
| I've not dug, but on first look https://opencloud.eu/en is a
| vague brochure with no real information.
| davewongillies wrote:
| There's a list of features here (no mention of
| completeness/maturity though) https://opencloud.eu/en/features
| dspillett wrote:
| Still more than a bit fluffy, but enough for me to bookmark
| it for future consideration, thanks. "File Native Backup" is
| interesting, while not a user feature - a lot of systems seem
| to give very little thought into that part of system admin.
| porjo wrote:
| The GitHub org page gives a better overview:
| https://github.com/opencloud-eu/
| c0balt wrote:
| It's file sharing with organizational features (shared
| directories, autz) and some value adds. They have integrated
| collabora online[0] for web office tasks and provide search on
| some indexable files (full-text + metadata).
|
| [0]: https://www.collaboraonline.com/
| lousken wrote:
| it would be nice to include a feature comparison chart between
| nextcloud and opencloud
| drnick1 wrote:
| Was this done because the performance of Nextcloud is poor? I
| have been using Nextcloud for a few years on my own (admittedly
| overkill) hardware and haven't had performance issues, but I am
| the only user.
| onli wrote:
| Iirc this stems from owncloud, and a programmer from them gave
| an interview in a German Foss podcast. Yes, it was performance
| related. They had high profile clients (CERN?) where the old
| code base was not sufficient, they thought.
| walterbell wrote:
| https://opencloud.eu/sites/default/files/media/documents/202...
|
| _> OpenCloud is based on a fork of the open source software
| 'ownCloud Infinite Scale ' (OCIS), whose components were co-
| developed by developers from the science organisation CERN and
| other active contributors. OpenCloud is now being further
| developed.. clear focus on data protection, interoperability.._
|
| https://owncloud.dev/ocis/ | https://github.com/owncloud/ocis
|
| _> modern file-sync and share platform.. oCIS breaks down the
| old [PHP] ownCloud 10 user specific namespace.. makes the
| individual parts accessible to clients as storage spaces and
| storage space registries.. WebDAV based oc sync protocol to
| manage files and folders, ocs to manage shares and TUS to upload
| files in a resumable way. On the server side REVA is the
| reference implementation of the CS3 apis which is defined using
| protobuf. By embedding libregraph /idm, oCIS provides a LDAP
| interface to make accounts, including guests available to
| firewalls and other systems._
|
| 2021, https://owncloud.com/news/owncloud-infinite-scale-live-at-
| ce... | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1oBQfD9QrCs
|
| _> [oCIS] first production deployment.. CERN IT department's
| storage team has engaged in UI, API and backend development with
| ownCloud for many years.. users have access to the underlying
| data repository containing 1.4 billion files and 12 petabytes of
| data._
|
| 2025 fork, https://github.com/orgs/opencloud-eu/discussions/262 |
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6cZKzpEw62M |
| https://www.heise.de/en/news/Ex-ownCloud-devs-seek-new-start...
|
| _> OpenCloud discusses the challenges that arise when
| proprietary products are discontinued or acquired by
| competitors.. examines a current case.. new company is likely to
| include over a dozen employees who previously worked on Infinite
| Scale for ownCloud._
| jauntywundrkind wrote:
| There was a recent "why nextcloud feels slow' submission.
| Submission itself seemed off-course, to not really have analyzed
| the problem well (picked a pretty conventional a-priori whipping
| boy of bundle sizes). To me the clear winner in the comments was
| pointing out that there are massive waterfalls of fetching data
| to the client. https://ounapuu.ee/posts/2025/11/03/nextcloud-
| slow/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45799860
|
| This data architecture problem burns you whether you are native
| or mobile, is the secret boss lurking in most application
| development. I wonder if OpenCloud is doing better than NextCloud
| with their middle-layers!
| vachina wrote:
| If you need a Docker to run what is essentially a webserver,
| I'm not surprised it will run slow.
|
| In my stack software shipped with Docker are the most
| unreliable, opaque messes. Whereas bare metals are usually
| light, lean and sustainably maintainable, especially single
| executables.
| nine_k wrote:
| If you have to do may round-trips to display a page after a
| UI action, and most round-trips involve hitting the storage
| on the server, the UI will feel slow sometimes.
| hamburglar wrote:
| Docker makes things slow now? What?
| janmalec wrote:
| I understood that their point was not that Docker makes it
| slow, but that if it needs Docker to run, it probably needs
| a complicated environment which makes it slow.
| dangus wrote:
| Which makes it an inaccurate and incorrect point.
|
| I'm not using docker to deploy things because the things
| I'm deploying need a complicated environment, I'm using
| it because it's an incredibly easy and consistent way to
| deploy things. It's an immutable image that is highly
| convenient to distribute, update, and manage, which is
| pretty much the opposite experience of installing
| software on virtual machines.
|
| Dropping a docker compose file into Portainer and I'm up
| and running with a new service in a few seconds. I've
| removed the overhead and spin up time of VMs, there's no
| more running Chef/Ansible to do basic VM management for
| every single service I'm running, no more
| cookbooks/playbooks or manual SSHing to get software
| updated, no more minutes to hours of fixing configuration
| management that never seems to work the first time, no
| more bad in-place upgrade states, etc.
| vachina wrote:
| > it's an incredibly easy and consistent way to deploy
| things
|
| I keep seeing people saying this but my experience has
| always been otherwise.
|
| Docker makes it really difficult to tinker with the
| internals of the container. They call it a development
| environment but you can't easily edit a file and restart
| a service. There is bind mounts but the IO performance is
| terrible, necessitating use of volumes. Every base image
| is opinionated in how things are done, where things are
| stored even for the same software.
|
| Since it's so difficult to tinker with the internals most
| vendors will provide a web interface abstraction on top
| of their software (like NPM for nginx) and if you so much
| so veer off the happy path by 1 inch the abstraction can
| no longer track the state of things and breaks,
| necessitating a full reinstall or editing the config
| manually.
|
| Of course this is in the context of self hosting. If
| you're paid in your day job to maintain a tower of babel
| then by all means fire up all those dynos.
| hamburglar wrote:
| I don't think of it as a "development environment" so
| much as a "deployment environment." Yes, it is more
| difficult to "tinker" with a running container. And for
| services that are just supposed to run and not be
| tinkered with, that's wonderful. I've deployed services
| that run on literally tens of thousands of containers and
| needing to tinker with the innards at this point is kind
| of a smell, like if you said "yeah, but I need to be able
| to add oil to my car while driving down the street
| because you never know when it's all gonna suddenly leak
| out,"
|
| Also, wasn't this comment about perf?
| dangus wrote:
| Why do I need to tinker with the internals of the
| container?
|
| Even if I need to do that, the existence of a Docker
| image doesn't stop me from making my own implementation
| as long as the application in question provides some kind
| of alternate distribution.
|
| E.g., if there's an RPM/DEB package, binary executable,
| JAR file, source code, etc, I can just make my own docker
| container with my own implementation and mess around with
| the internals as much as I want.
| hn92726819 wrote:
| Nextcloud isn't lighter and leaner outside of docker. It
| isn't faster either
| jauntywundrkind wrote:
| 100%. This person is a very specific anti-* hater, for
| something that was such a rampantly popular hatred 10 years
| ago. But the FUDites _rarely_ bother with bona-fides, with
| real argument.
|
| We should feel bad for them, those decoupled folks who
| needs help. It's sad pathetic and remarkable how these
| weird software enmities crop up, are let to grow and never
| addressed. Their time of their outrage being popular & hip
| fades but the disdain-without-argument sticks around.
|
| Thankfully container hatred is a pretty tiny frakking
| force, of very disparate widely scattered eccentrics these
| days. But there's so many weird FUD proclivities folks can
| opt into, can find to stoke their lifelong hatreds against.
| Theres just so few warnings: such audience acuity is
| required to parse, realize the windmill tilting, & move
| along.
| stiray wrote:
| On the other side, docker is just installation system, so
| why even care.
| vachina wrote:
| You wouldn't deploy NextCloud if not for docker.
| zaphirplane wrote:
| Hmm docker is resource isolation not a VM. Strange unless
| running it on windows or Mac or something cross architecture
| GuestFAUniverse wrote:
| It's not docker itself. It's the mindset of some of its
| users: just throw in every garbage and don't bother about
| maintenance.
|
| It's also often used by users shying away from maintenance
| -- often due to a demanding schedule. Sometimes not
| grasping the level of investment they need to do to have a
| good Dockerfile. If seen too many self-managed
| installations where the user mapping is utter crap an the
| process are running with random system users or random end-
| user UIDs.
| c0balt wrote:
| It's nice to see Heinlein groups' activities see some more
| publicity.
|
| They have been continuously chipping away at making OSS more
| suitable for business and government use-cases (from Big Blue
| Button to NextCloud). OpenCloud and OpenTalk are some of their
| current in-house developed efforts in this sector.
| awestroke wrote:
| We really need an owncloud/nextcloud alternative with zero PHP.
| gertop wrote:
| Owncloud already has zero PHP with the introduction of Owncloud
| Infinite Scale (written in Go) introduced in 2022.
| awestroke wrote:
| I see php code in that repo
| DeathArrow wrote:
| You mean you want a Javascript variant?
| awestroke wrote:
| I'd prefer something in Rust or C#
| OoooooooO wrote:
| Rust, C#, Java, Go and maybe even Erlang would suffice for
| modern stack and IO heavy and performant workloads.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| If you are okay with Rust or C# idk why Go is an issue? Go
| powers most infrastructure on the internet that we rely on.
| Docker, Kubernetes, Hugo, Caddy, MinIO, a lot of these are
| used in backend services so you would never even realize
| you are using them but you are. I think Go is fine.
| tormeh wrote:
| I'd prefer Rust as well, but anything with a decent type
| system is okay. I have bad associations with Java
| software, but idk if that's the language itself, or
| enterprise brainworns.
| awestroke wrote:
| Go is fine, but I prefer Rust and C#.
| tormeh wrote:
| Anything with types. And that doesn't have "wat" videos about
| its behaviour.
| homebrewer wrote:
| Modern PHP is a strongly typed language, still dynamically
| typed, but in a way that feels more like static typing.
| Better than TypeScript for sure if you're not into PhD-
| level typing hacks, and light years ahead of Ruby, Python,
| JS, and their ilk.
|
| https://www.php.net/manual/en/language.types.type-
| system.php
|
| As for "wat videos", you'll find that about anything.
| port11 wrote:
| What about PHP merits this statement? It's 2025, PHP has become
| modern, performant, and has good frameworks that are battle-
| tested and reliable. Yikes. (And this from a former PHP and now
| Node developer.)
| mono442 wrote:
| It is not really suited for software which need to maintain
| long lived connections and that's the case with nextcloud
| when uploading or downloading large files.
| beefnugs wrote:
| My entire 20 year career is filled with wordpress blunders, i
| could never ever trust php again, ever ever ever, even if
| they said it has been reimplented by completely different
| people in every other language.
|
| there is something about "theme" code leading to complete
| control of servers that is fundamentally broken in every way,
| there is no coming back from this reputation
| stiray wrote:
| Good job to the authors. I have been waiting for something like
| that for years.
|
| I just dislike the scripted languages as they are a mess to
| handle while docker is a resource waste, not to mention golang
| single statically compiled binary and speed of execution.
|
| Authors, please think really well about:
|
| - upgrade strategies (owncloud/nextcloud were a huge mess, for
| long time, currently looks that nextcloud is handling it well - I
| have upgraded it for 2 versions and it didnt break anything)
|
| - what external dependencies you are using, make additional layer
| of OS abstraction to avoid incompatibilities between various
| linux distributions, freebsd and windows. There isn't a lot to
| handle differently but once you tie yourself to linux only, it is
| hard to add support afterwards (try to not call external binaries
| that you havent installed yourself, if you must, put it into
| compatibility layer). If you do this one right, people will port
| it to different environments, if you blow it, you will have to -
| or you wont.
|
| - do not rely on docker "installation", presume that it is
| installed directly on the system and you wont go far wrong. Treat
| docker just as another system. Docker is going to make you become
| "lazy" to not think about vital details while developing.
|
| - do check how to handle reverse proxies gracefully, this is
| something everyone forgets while for any serious environment,
| there will be nginx frontend
|
| - dont support all the databases, pick one and stick to it, to
| support it really well, including backups, upgrades and versions
| - sooner or later redis is going to be a must, think upfront
|
| - make a backup system, backup before upgrades and be sure you
| can restore it if something goes wrong, including binaries,
| database,...
|
| - make an installation/upgrade layer that doesn't depend on "run
| this sql script", have a well versioned database revision system
| that can get database from version "0.1" to "2.0" without
| breaking anything and migrate the data. There are hardly any
| database changes where database upgrade cant be handled with sql
| statements.
|
| - think really well about external dependencies, dont pick it
| just as it is popular and you need one functionality. An example,
| recently I did a benchmark of 15 concurrent maps in go and the
| differences were huge where the fastest one was one that you can
| hardly find by searching while the author did things like
| aligning the structures with cpu cache, full of unsafe pointers
| etc., but beating the first selected "popular" map by 2x, and the
| worse by 15x+. Dont trust authors self promotion, measure it.
|
| - try to not make it confusingly strange, you have the whole
| usage/administration well done with nextcloud, stick to it, dont
| reinvent what works, as for instance, sftpgo did and I hate every
| second using it.
|
| - if something needs to be documented, think about how to
| implement it, in a way, that doesnt need to be documented. Over
| time those documented features become a huge burden for you and
| for users.
|
| - please, if you dethrone nextcloud, dont become evil, like
| projects normally do. Get the money from where the money is (smb,
| corporations), spare the home users. :)
|
| Good luck!
| synergy20 wrote:
| curious about the concurrent map benchmark, any more info.
|
| real great list to consider for the project!
| ewuhic wrote:
| One word for you and for developers: Nix.
| digital_voodoo wrote:
| Nice to read these points/warnings;)
|
| The product seems more 'focused' than Nextcloud, for sure.
|
| But their docker choices are quite opinionated: no longer than
| yesterday I've tried (once again!) to make it run, and the fact
| that I have Caddy + Authelia in front of seems to be rather
| detrimental. I dropped the ball, and will try again in a few
| weeks or months.
| whatsupdog wrote:
| Cool. Once they have notes, tasks, calendar, passwords and an otp
| manager, I'm dropping nextcloud in a heartbeat!
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| If it does webdav, it automatically does passwords. My password
| manager has otp anyway. Calendar's important, but I'm pretty
| sure that it (and contacts) are also just webdav.
|
| Notes though... ouch. I can't find anything for that, there's
| no decent Notes client that does webdav natively.
| MayeulC wrote:
| jtx ? https://jtx.techbee.at/
|
| Available on F-Droid
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| Looked interesting... then I noticed it was Android only. I
| need something for iOS and desktop, ideally.
| dugite-code wrote:
| Calendar and tasks uses CalDav and contacts are CardDav. Very
| similar to WebDAV but have their own idiosyncrasies.
|
| The biggest issue is the web interfaces, there are a ton of
| edge cases that has taken Nextcloud years to work through.
|
| Not to mention the exploration of wedav push by the Davx5
| team https://manual.davx5.com/webdav_push.html.
|
| For notes I currently use obsidian with the remotely-save
| plugin https://github.com/remotely-save/remotely-save
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| Obsidian looks interesting, I will have to see if I can get
| the plugin installed and tested. At one point the guy
| writing Notebooks did webdav, but Apple yanked the rug out
| from under him so that webdav no longer worked well and he
| just decided it was no longer a feature. And my notes have
| been a mess for years afterward. Joplin _looked_ like it
| would be a good replacement, but it spams up the md files,
| so that if you ever switch away from it you 'd spend months
| cleaning them up. So basically I've just been using an open
| Sublime window and syncing by hand... no fun.
| doubled112 wrote:
| I don't use Joplin for this reason. I just want a folder
| of markdown files. It was mildly difficult to escape from
| even with the export features.
|
| I did script the cleanup. Title field to filename, then
| remove the header completely. Or something like that.
|
| Had another script that would take the date (which
| happened to be my filenames) and commit the file into a
| git repo pretending it was committed that day too. Dear
| diary style.
|
| Quick and dirty but it did what I needed it to do.
| whatsupdog wrote:
| For passwords, I can make a compromise and use another
| option. But for everything else I would prefer everything in
| one place.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| I've been using Enpass for years. It's webdav functionality
| is sufficient, and it's available on every platform except
| my kids' Xbox (wish they built one for that, some passwords
| I have to keep short because they need them for the games).
|
| It's not perfect, last year or so they keep trying to shove
| some ads into it, but nothing too obnoxious yet. And if you
| have any spaces in your webdav path where it saves the
| passwords, takes a little thought to work through.
| zerof1l wrote:
| I've been using Nextcloud now for 4+ years. The latest major
| versions pretty much have no features that benefit regular home
| users. They are now chasing government contracts and AI hype.
|
| Nextcloud can't even get Notes done right. I lost the entire
| contents of the note randomly not long ago. And the mobile Note
| app refuses to load the editor sometimes.
|
| That being said, most of the time, Nextcloud works ok. I don't
| want to replace Nextcloud with another jack of all trades, master
| of none. Instead, I'm slowly migrating to good alternatives that
| do one thing well: Immich for photos, Obsidian for notes.
| virtue3 wrote:
| thanks for the immich suggestion.
|
| How have you liked Obsidian? I was going to use it but realized
| it pay walled sharing notes between devices. Looking into this
| again - are you self hosting Obsidian via LiveSync plugin?
|
| Thanks!
| zerof1l wrote:
| I'm self-hosting Obsidian sync. I mostly followed the
| tutorial here: https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1
| eo7knj/guide_o...
|
| Except I wanted more security and multiple users. Instead of
| using the default admin user, I created one user for each
| person. Done in the "_users" database. Then create one
| database for each person. Assign each user as a "Member" to
| their respective database, not admin. Now each person has
| their own credentials that can access only their database.
| syntaxing wrote:
| You can simply put your vault in a cloud folder if you don't
| want to pay for Livesync
| chrisweekly wrote:
| Not OP but I'm a very happy longtime Obsidian user. Maybe a
| little unfair to characterize as "paywalled" given their sync
| service is optional (and works very well), and a directory of
| markdown files is about as portable and flexible as it gets
| for self-hosting.
| maccard wrote:
| > That being said, most of the time, Nextcloud works ok.
|
| Most of the time isn't enough when dealing with data these days
| unfortunately. I've been using google docs since 2009, and I
| have lost 0 data in that time. I still have my student essays
| from back then. Things need to be this reliable to compete
| unfortunately.,
| chrisweekly wrote:
| Ok, I hope you take regular backups. Depending on Google
| risks sudden account lockout w/ no recourse. Everything
| suddenly gone, "poof". Others in this thread can do a better
| job than me describing other tradeoffs for self-hosting vs
| dependence on Google.
| maccard wrote:
| Others in the thread also do a good job of describing the
| risk of self hosting - these tools are buggy, have
| synchronisation issues, have workflow quirks and sharp
| edges. For all their pain points, google docs works and
| it's reliable.
|
| I've had way more issues of unrecoverable data with self
| managed tools than the major cloud hosted tools. There's
| risks with everything, and I only have so much time in the
| day to spend on these things..
| TheNewsIsHere wrote:
| With self hosting tools I have found the key to success
| is simplicity. When I stopped conflating my home lab,
| home production, and what I thought I wanted, things just
| became so much simpler and more reliable.
|
| YMMV of course. I've come to the conclusion that a lot of
| self hosters are unintentionally confused about the
| differences between those things, and it makes an easy
| recipe for problems.
| 4bpp wrote:
| It seems like they, too, have no calendar application?
|
| Google Calendar is the single most indispensable feature of the
| entire Google suite for me (apart from Mail, of course), so I
| can't see myself switching to something without, and yet
| Nextcloud continues being the seemingly only self-hosted
| alternative that has it ( _including_ the web interface: I don 't
| want to have to run a second web browser like Thunderbird to edit
| calendar entries on my computer).
|
| What is it about JS calendar shells that makes them so seemingly
| hard to implement? Even the big-name open source CalDAV servers
| like Baikal that flirt with corporate adoption never seem to
| implement them.
| zdragnar wrote:
| There are dozens of open source Google calendar clones in JS;
| picking a random not-react example off of the front page of an
| npm search: https://fullcalendar.io/
| 4bpp wrote:
| I don't see anything about CalDAV, sync or mobile integration
| on that site, though. The thing that actually makes
| Google/Nextcloud calendars useful is that they enable a
| workflow where you schedule events on your computer (where
| most scheduling happens, at least for me) and then are
| reminded of it on your phone (which is with you when/where
| scheduled events actually happen).
| maxnoe wrote:
| They integrate with radicale since May this year for card- and
| caldav
|
| https://opencloud.eu/en/news/opencloud-calendar-and-contact-...
| 4bpp wrote:
| The post, at least, seems to have no word about a web
| interface, though? I'm aware of a number of CalDAV/CardDAV
| servers, but they all seem to be designed for a workflow
| where you only access the calendar from a mobile app.
| Conversely, standalone _web_ calendars like the
| fullcalendar.io thing linked in a sibling post make no
| mention of any support for CalDAV or other ways to
| synchronise with phones and calendar apps.
|
| It's the integration of _both_ that makes Google (and, I
| guess, Nextcloud) useful: you can add an event on your
| computer (which is where most of the scheduling and planning
| happens), and then inspect and be alerted of it on your phone
| (which is with you when you are in a random location and need
| to be reminded of an event).
|
| Even if there does exist a standalone JS calendar application
| that can sync with CalDAV, you would be left with an awkward
| setup when self-hosting, since now for no obvious reason you
| need to have two services on the same machine (the database
| and the frontend) that maintain a copy of the same state and
| need to sync with each other constantly.
| asim wrote:
| OCIS made use of the Go Micro framework, which I wrote. It means
| the fork by OpenCloud does as well. OSS is funny that way. You
| could write something used by all sorts of other users, profited
| in all sorts of different ways but see no help or contribution
| back. Hope OpenCloud does better for their community and the
| software they depend on than ownCloud or others. Not a knock on
| them or anyone else. Just the realities of open source.
| smetannik wrote:
| Any other advantages besides using a different PL?
| mrsssnake wrote:
| Nextcloud is AGPL, that ensures when using an external hosting
| provider you still has the freedoms, access to source code (their
| modifications) and the setup is portable.
|
| It can be very buggy and slow, especially the addon apps, but
| after years of usage I cherry-pick the functions that works for
| me from those that are too basic or unstable. The experience of
| Nextcloud is very uneven.
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(page generated 2025-11-09 23:01 UTC)