Self-Host With Ease: Using Regolo in your nextcloud instance

Understanding Nextcloud: The Foundation of Digital Sovereignty

Defining Nextcloud Hub: Architecture and Components

Nextcloud Hub is fundamentally defined as a self-hosted, open-source content collaboration platform. Its core mandate is to provide users and organizations with a secure environment where they retain full control over their sensitive data, including documents, calendars, contacts, and photos, by storing them securely on their own servers or a trusted private cloud. This approach directly addresses the pervasive issue of data centralization, ensuring data location and access are determined solely by the owner.

Architecturally, Nextcloud Hub functions as a unified platform that optimizes collaboration flow by combining several integral components. This consolidated structure distinguishes it from proprietary solutions that often require juggling disparate applications. The system’s core functionality is built upon five pillars, forming a comprehensive digital workspace:

Nextcloud Files: Provides robust file sync and share capabilities, allowing seamless access and boundless sharing across various locations and devices, integrating with existing network structures like Dropbox or FTP drives.
Nextcloud Talk: Facilitates real-time communication, including calls, chat, and video conferencing.
Nextcloud Groupware: Manages essential organizational tools, encompassing Calendar, Contacts, and Mail.
Nextcloud Office: Enables real-time document collaboration, offering a fully integrated productivity suite.
Nextcloud Assistant: Functions as a private and local AI assistant, integrating generative artificial intelligence features directly into the platform.

The Nextcloud Philosophy: Open Source and Community Foundation

The philosophical foundation of Nextcloud is rooted in open-source principles and digital sovereignty. It is driven by a global community of developers and contributors. Since its founding in 2016, Nextcloud has remained independent. It has grown organically and is still fully employee-owned. This structure reinforces its mission and shields it from external investor pressure.

This independence supports a broader movement seeking alternatives to centralized proprietary technology. The issue is especially relevant in today’s global political climate and data privacy landscape. Nextcloud believes that control of knowledge equals power. Centralized data storage can enable abuse by political actors, law enforcement, or corporate competitors. For this reason, the platform treats privacy as a fundamental right. It views privacy as essential for democracy. A private Nextcloud server becomes the starting point for users who want to regain control over their data.

To strengthen its position and speed up the adoption of sovereign IT solutions, Nextcloud has announced a strategic investment of more than €250 million through 2030. This commitment highlights the platform’s long-term stability and viability. It signals that Nextcloud is moving beyond its reputation as a hobbyist solution. It now aims to stand as a credible, well-resourced competitor to proprietary cloud providers. The investment will expand the global workforce, with a strong focus on engineering. The goal is to improve performance, stability, and feature diversity while empowering the open-source community. This financial backing shifts the discussion from a simple technological choice to a sustainable, industry-wide push for digital sovereignty.

Why Nextcloud Matters: Sovereignty and Collaboration

The Case for Self-Hosting and Data Sovereignty

The necessity of Nextcloud is derived from the critical challenge posed by centralized data storage. The current landscape is dominated by a few large companies that store nearly all data concerning individuals and organizations—from search history and locations to purchasing habits. This centralization creates an inherent vulnerability, as this concentration of power makes data susceptible to abuse by those in authority or those with commercial interests.

Nextcloud directly mitigates this risk by empowering individuals and organizations to operate their own IT solutions. Running Nextcloud on-premises or with a trusted provider ensures that sensitive data is kept securely within a controlled environment, which is crucial for guaranteeing privacy compliance and controlling the narrative surrounding data usage. By adhering to a privacy-first philosophy, Nextcloud allows organizations to embrace advanced functionality, such as generative AI, without violating the foundational principle that data must remain under the owner’s control.

Core Collaboration and Workflow Use Cases

Beyond privacy, Nextcloud Hub provides a comprehensive solution for organizational productivity. It unifies functionalities typically dispersed across multiple proprietary services, thereby streamlining workflows and reducing the need for users to switch between applications.

Key productivity features include:

Process Automation: The Nextcloud Flow application drives digital transformation by offering advanced business process automation based on technologies like Windmill, allowing for the creation of easy-to-use, automated workflows.
Security and Auditing: For environments requiring high regulatory compliance and operational visibility, Nextcloud provides built-in apps for Auditing, Activities, and Server Information. These tools are essential for monitoring system performance, tracking user activities, and ensuring the legal department has the necessary oversight capabilities for data protection and retention.

The decision to integrate Generative AI directly into Nextcloud is a strategic move, acknowledging that AI is a “no-brainer for collaboration software” and necessary for competitive parity with major tech companies. However, this integration introduces a fundamental tension: advanced functionality must not compromise the core sovereignty mandate. If Nextcloud were to integrate AI by sending sensitive collaboration data to third-party commercial LLM providers, it would fundamentally violate the platform’s promise. This technological necessity mandates the implementation of rigorous, self-hosted, private AI solutions—a factor that informs the platform’s architectural choices for AI integration.

Deployment Strategies for Nextcloud Hub

Choosing the correct installation path for Nextcloud is critical, especially when planning for the deployment of resource-intensive AI components. The platform supports a variety of installation methods tailored to different user levels and resource constraints.

Choosing the Optimal Installation Path

For administrators, the choice of deployment often balances ease of use against technical flexibility and resource allocation:

Nextcloud All-in-One (AIO): This is the official and community-supported installation method, designed for easy deployment and streamlined maintenance. AIO provides a fully featured, integrated Nextcloud instance, typically managing components like HTTPS certificates automatically. It is widely recommended for production use due to its simplicity.
The Community Snap Package: An excellent option for rapid setup, especially for home users, as it includes a full, production-ready stack and handles automatic updates and HTTPS certificate management, ensuring ongoing security with minimal administrative effort.
Docker Images: Maintained by the community, Docker images provide high flexibility. They are often the preferred choice for advanced administrators who need precise control over the environment for integration into existing container orchestration systems or custom network setups.
Specialized Appliances: These include the NextcloudPi image for single-board computers (SBCs) like Raspberry Pi, and the Nextcloud Virtual Machine (VM) Appliance. These methods cater to specific hardware environments but may face resource limitations when scaling intensive workloads.

Deployment Method Constraints and external provider Integration

The primary constraint for Nextcloud administrators is the high resource demand of running Large Language Model (LLM) inference directly on the collaboration server. For performance and scalability, the most robust architectural approach is to connect Nextcloud to an external, OpenAI-compatible AI backend using the dedicated integration_openai app.

This strategy is the preferred path for production environments regardless of the core Nextcloud installation method—including Nextcloud All-in-One (AIO), Snap, and Docker images. By using the integration_openai app, the Nextcloud instance delegates computationally heavy AI tasks to a separate system, ensuring that the performance and operational ease of the main collaboration server are not compromised.

This external integration allows for two key pathways:

Commercial AI as a Service (AIaaS): Connecting directly to a commercial provider like OpenAI, which offers reliable high performance.
Dedicated Self-Hosted API: Connecting to a self-hosted, OpenAI-compatible service like LocalAI or Ollama running on separate, dedicated hardware.

The strategic choice of deployment methods, while influencing initial setup complexity, does not preclude the use of the highly flexible external API integration:

Deployment Method	Target Scenario	Required AI Integration Path
Nextcloud All-in-One (AIO)	Ease of Management, Production	Dedicated Self-Hosted API (LocalAI/Ollama) or Commercial AIaaS via `integration_openai`
Community Snap Package	Home/Single User, Quick Setup	Dedicated Self-Hosted API (LocalAI/Ollama) or Commercial AIaaS via `integration_openai`
Docker Image (Manual)	Advanced Admin, Custom Scaling	Dedicated Self-Hosted API (LocalAI/Ollama) or Commercial AIaaS via `integration_openai`

Installation Examples: Container Orchestration

The Nextcloud ecosystem strongly encourages container-based deployments for ease of setup, maintenance, and upgrade. Here are the docker-compose.yml examples for the two primary, community-recommended methods for production environments use Docker Compose for orchestration.

A. Nextcloud All-in-One (AIO) Example (Recommended for Simplicity)

The AIO solution simplifies deployment by managing all necessary components (database, cache, web server, and Nextcloud) within one integrated stack, controlled by a master container. This configuration is widely recommended for its ease of setup and maintenance.

name: nextcloud-aio
services:
  nextcloud-aio-mastercontainer:
    image: ghcr.io/nextcloud-releases/all-in-one:latest
    restart: always
    container_name: nextcloud-aio-mastercontainer
    volumes:
      - nextcloud_aio_mastercontainer:/mnt/docker-aio-config
      - /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock:ro 
    network_mode: bridge
    # networks: ["nextcloud-aio"]
    ports:
      - 80:80
      - 8080:8080
      - 8443:8443 
volumes:
  nextcloud_aio_mastercontainer:
    name: nextcloud_aio_mastercontainer Code language: Dockerfile (dockerfile)

B. Standard Nextcloud Deployment with Database and Cache

For advanced users requiring a highly customized environment, manually orchestrating the core Nextcloud application alongside dedicated database (MariaDB/PostgreSQL) and caching (Redis) containers offers maximum flexibility. This is the ufficial example from nextcloud’s docker github repo, which requires the setting of MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD and MYSQL_PASSWORD variables.

services:
  # Note: MariaDB is external service. You can find more information about the configuration here:
  # https://hub.docker.com/_/mariadb
  db:
    # Note: Check the recommend version here: https://docs.nextcloud.com/server/latest/admin_manual/installation/system_requirements.html#server
    image: mariadb:lts
    restart: always
    command: --transaction-isolation=READ-COMMITTED
    volumes:
      - db:/var/lib/mysql
    environment:
      - MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD=
      - MYSQL_PASSWORD=
      - MYSQL_DATABASE=nextcloud
      - MYSQL_USER=nextcloud

  # Note: Redis is an external service. You can find more information about the configuration here:
  # https://hub.docker.com/_/redis
  redis:
    image: redis:alpine
    restart: always

  app:
    image: nextcloud
    restart: always
    ports:
      - 8080:80
    depends_on:
      - redis
      - db
    volumes:
      - nextcloud:/var/www/html
    environment:
      - MYSQL_PASSWORD=
      - MYSQL_DATABASE=nextcloud
      - MYSQL_USER=nextcloud
      - MYSQL_HOST=db

volumes:
  nextcloud:
  db:Code language: Dockerfile (dockerfile)

The Nextcloud Ecosystem: Apps and Extensibility

Nextcloud App Ecosystem and Modular Functionality

The modular design is a key strength of the Nextcloud platform, allowing administrators to extend core functionalities through a vast ecosystem of apps. This modularity permits organizations to tailor their instances precisely to their operational requirements, supporting everything from standard collaboration to highly specialized professional use cases.

The application store features a wide range of extensions :

Productivity and Integration: Apps like ONLYOFFICE offer real-time document editing, while integration apps like IBM watsonx.ai integration and SharePoint Backend facilitate integration with complex enterprise systems.
Security and Compliance: The platform supports multiple two-factor authentication methods, including TOTP (Time-based One-Time Password) and two-factor authentication via Nextcloud notifications, ensuring robust user access control.
Niche Tools: Specialized functionality, such as the DICOM Viewer for digital imaging in medicine or various tools for catalog management (Software Catalogus), showcases the breadth of the community’s contributions.

Nextcloud Assistant: Integrated Private AI Functionality

The Nextcloud Assistant represents the integrated AI layer within Nextcloud Hub. Built as a private and local assistant, its design focus is on enhancing productivity while rigorously preventing data leaks. The Assistant is accessible via a dedicated button on the top-right and integrates across all primary Hub components.

The functional capabilities of the Assistant are far-reaching, transforming core collaboration processes:

Functionality Across Nextcloud Hub Applications

Hub Component	Key AI Functionality	Description
Nextcloud Office/Text	Text Generation & Refinement	Supports free prompts, text summarization, headline creation, proofreading, rewording existing text, and changing tone. Accessed via a smart picker or slash command.
Nextcloud Files	Document Processing & Transcription	Enables document summarization and transcription of audio files directly from the file’s context menu (right-click). It also assists in generating starter documents (e.g., meeting notes, project outlines).
Nextcloud Talk	Call and Chat Summarization	Provides concise summaries of chat messages and calls, highlighting key decisions and action items. Offers translation of chat messages and live AI subtitles in video calls.
Nextcloud Mail	Email Management	Integrates to summarize lengthy email threads and suggests appropriate replies.
Nextcloud Groupware	Scheduling and Planning	Provides intelligent suggestions for free/busy times in the Calendar, analyzing availability and commitments.

Advanced Features: Agency and Context Awareness

The Nextcloud Assistant extends beyond simple generative text capabilities into sophisticated agency features, allowing it to perform actions on the user’s behalf. This includes performing tasks such as booking meetings in Nextcloud Calendar, sending emails, and reading/sending messages in Nextcloud Talk.

Furthermore, the Assistant utilizes context awareness, which significantly enhances its utility and precision:

Context Chat: A sophisticated chat bot that can access and analyze a user’s documentation (contracts, reports, papers) to provide targeted answers. The scope can be manually defined, even limited to a specific file or folder for heightened precision.
Context Write: A feature that derives context from existing files to generate new texts while replicating the unique tone, wording, and structure of the source material.

These advanced Agency and Context features are inherently highly sensitive, requiring the LLM to process and manipulate user data in real-time. This necessity strengthens the argument for integrating self-hosted, private AI solutions. If an AI assistant is authorized to read sensitive documents and send emails, that data processing must occur entirely within the organization’s secure environment to uphold the core principles of digital sovereignty and prevent the proprietary training of third-party models with sensitive input.

Integrating Nextcloud with Regolo

The integration of advanced AI capabilities into Nextcloud is managed through a flexible abstraction layer centered around the OpenAI API standard. This strategic architectural choice allows Nextcloud to utilize a wide range of providers—from commercial services to dedicated self-hosted open-source backends—using the same configuration framework.

The OpenAI API as the Integration Standard

Nextcloud leverages the OpenAI and LocalAI integration app (referred to as integration_openai) to communicate with Large Language Models (LLMs). This application is designed not just for OpenAI but for any service that implements an API sufficiently similar to the OpenAI API. This includes widely used services such as IBM watsonx , Replicate, and self-hosted alternatives like LocalAI and Ollama. Furthermore, other third-party providers such as Groqcloud, MistralAI, and Together AI can often be integrated, provided their APIs maintain high compatibility.

It is important to note, however, that Nextcloud explicitly tests the Assistant tasks that this app implements only with OpenAI models against the official OpenAI API. Compatibility with other APIs, even those claiming to be compatible (e.g., LocalAI), cannot be guaranteed for every advanced feature.

Integration Pathways: Commercial (AIaaS) and Self-Hosted Backends

The integration of any AI provider—whether a commercial AI as a Service (AIaaS) or a self-hosted engine like LocalAI or Ollama—follows the identical configuration framework within Nextcloud. The administrative difference lies solely in defining the API endpoint and the required key for authentication.

Nextcloud AI Configuration Walkthrough:

Install App: Install the “OpenAI and LocalAI integration” app (integration_openai) from the Nextcloud App Store.
Access Settings: Log in as an administrator and navigate to Administration Settings, specifically the Connected Accounts section (settings/admin/connected-accounts).
Key Entry: Enter the required API Key or secret token in the field provided for the “OpenAI and LocalAI integration”.
Service URL Entry: The Service URL is the default AI endpoint, you can choose to use a self hosted environment, as well as an AI provider like regolo with its more models and ease of use (e.g., https://api.regolo.ai/v1).
Model Selection: Once the Service URL is successfully communicating with the endpoint, the administrator can select the desired language model and enable the available AI functions.

Conclusions

Nextcloud Hub successfully champions digital sovereignty by offering a comprehensive content collaboration platform where users maintain absolute control over their data location and usage. The system’s architecture, combining core productivity features with a focus on auditability and compliance, provides a credible and resilient alternative to centralized Big Tech solutions.

The integration of artificial intelligence into the platform is achieved through a strategically sound technical compromise: utilizing the ubiquitous OpenAI API as a flexible abstraction layer via the integration_openai app. This approach ensures that sophisticated features—such as document summarization, meeting transcriptions, and advanced text generation—can be deployed without sending potentially sensitive organizational data to untrusted external parties.

The future of Nextcloud AI points toward enhanced autonomy and workflow integration. The continued expansion of the Nextcloud Assistant’s Agency features—allowing the AI to securely automate complex tasks like scheduling meetings and sending follow-up communications within the user’s private environment—signals a maturation of the platform. This evolution confirms Nextcloud’s core objective: proving that organizations do not have to compromise their digital sovereignty to harness the full, transformative power of generative artificial intelligence, and we, at regolo.ai, are fully aligned with this mission. By building solutions that respect privacy-by-design principles while elevating real-world productivity, we aim to empower users and organizations to deploy cutting-edge AI on their own terms.