owncloud vs pydio – more diy cloud storage

Last week I wrote a how-to on using Pydio as a front-end to a MooseFS distributed data storage cluster.

The big complaint I had while writing that was that I wanted to use ownCloud, but it doesn’t Just Work™ on {{CentOS}} 6^*.

After finishing the tutorial, I decided to do some more digging – because ownCloud looks cool. And because it bugged me that it didn’t work on CentOS 6.

What I found is that ownCloud 8 doesn’t work on CentOS 6 (at least not easily).

The simple install guide and process really is about version 8, and the last one that can be speedy-installed is 7. And as everyone knows, major version releases often make major changes in how they work. This appears to be very much the case with ownCloud going from 7 to 8.

In fact, the two pages needed for installing ownCloud are so easy to follow, I see no reason to copy them here. It’s literally three shell commands followed by a web wizard. It’s almost too easy.

You need to have {{MySQL}}/{{MariaDB}} installed and ready to accept connections (or use {{SQLite}}) – make a database, user, and give the user perms on the db. And you need {{Apache}} installed and running (along with {{PHP}} – but yum will manage that for you).

If you’re going to use MooseFS (or any other similar tool) for your storage backend to ownCloud, be sure, too, to bind mount your MFS mount point back to the ownCloud data directory (by default it’s /var/www/html/owncloud/data). Note: you could start by using local storage for ownCloud, and only migrate to a distributed setup later.

Pros of Pydio

• very little futzing needed to make it work with CentOS 6
• very clean user management
• very clean webui
• light system requirements (doesn’t even require a database)

Pros of ownCloud

• apps available for major mobile platforms ({{iOS}}, {{Android}}), desktop)
• no futzing needed to work with CentOS 7
• very clean user management
• clean webui

Cons of Pydio

• no interface except the webui

Cons of ownCloud

• needs a database
• heavier system requirements
• doesn’t like CentOS 6

What about other cloud environments like Seafile? I like Seafile, too. Have it running, in fact. Would recommend it – though I think there are better options now than it (including ownCloud & Pydio).

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^{*_{Why do I keep harping on the CentOS 6 vs 7 support / ease-of-use? Because CentOS / {{RHEL}} 7 is different from previous releases. I covered that it was different for the Blue Grass Linux User Group a few months ago. Yeah, I know I should be embracing the New Way™ of doing things – but like most people, I can be a technical curmudgeon (especially humorous when you consider I work in a field that is about not being curmudgeonly).}}

^{_{Guess this means I really need to dive into the new means of doing things (mostly the differences in how services are managed) – fortunately, the Fedora Project put together this handy cheatsheet. And Digital Ocean has a clew of tutorials on basic sysadmin things – one I used for this comparison was here.}}