Apps management

Nextcloud apps can enhance, customize or even restrict the features and experience you and your users has with the Nextcloud server. Next to default enabled functions like Files, Activity and Photos there are other apps like Calendar, Contacts, Talk and more which are enhancing the features of your Nextcloud server.

After installing the Nextcloud server, you might want to consider about enabling, disabling or even restricting some apps to groups depending on your and your users’ needs.

Apps

During the Nextcloud server installation, some apps are enabled by default. To see which apps are enabled go to your Apps page.

Those apps are supported and developed by Nextcloud GmbH directly and have an Featured-tag.

Note

Your Nextcloud server needs to be able to communicate with https://apps.nextcloud.com to list and download apps. Please make sure to whitelist this target in your firewall or proxy if necessary.

Note

To get access to work-arounds, long-term-support, priority bug fixing and custom consulting for supported apps, contact our sales team.

Note

If you would like to develop your own Nextcloud app, you can find out more information in our developer manual.

All apps must be licensed under AGPLv3+ or any compatible license.

Managing apps

App store page for installing, enabling and disabling apps.

You will see which apps are enabled, disabled and available. You’ll also see additional app bundles and filters, such as Customization, Security and Monitoring for finding more apps quickly.

In the Apps page you can enable or disable applications. Some apps have configurable options on the Apps page, such as Enable only for specific groups, but mainly they are enabled or disabled here, and are configured in your Nextcloud settings (admin and/or user-settings) or in the config.php.

Click the app name to view a description of the app and any of the app settings in the Application View field. Clicking the Enable button will enable the app. If the app is not part of the Nextcloud installation, it will be downloaded from the app store, installed and enabled.

App updates will also be offered to you on this page. Simply click on the Update button to update a specific app or use the Update all button on top of the page to update all apps.

Note

Beta releases: You can also install beta releases of apps directly from here by switching your Nextcloud to the beta channel in the admin overview.

Update notifications

The always installed updatenotification app allows administrators to be notified on available app and Nextcloud updates. Moreover, since Nextcloud 29, this app also allows to notify users about updated apps and the changes that are included in the update. This notification is enabled by default if the app provides a changelog.

To disable user notifications use:

occ config:app:set --type boolean --value="false" updatenotification app_updated.enabled

By default guest users, when using the guests app, are not notified, to enable notifications also for them use:

occ config:app:set --type boolean --value="true" updatenotification app_updated.notify_guests

Enabling apps via occ command

In addition to managing apps via the web interface, administrators can also enable or disable apps using the occ command.

To enable an app, use the following command:

occ app:enable <app-id>

For example, to enable the “files” app, run:

occ app:enable files

To enable the app for specific groups, use the –groups option:

occ app:enable files --groups=admin

This command enables the “files” app only for the “admin” group.

To disable an app, use:

occ app:disable <app-id>

Using private API

If private API, rather than the public APIs are used in a third-party app, the installation fails, if 'appcodechecker' => true, is set in config.php.

Using custom app directories

Use the apps_paths array in config.php to set any custom apps directory locations. The key path defines the absolute file system path to the app folder. The key url defines the HTTP web path to that folder, starting at the Nextcloud web root. The key writable indicates if a user can install apps in that folder.

Example: To ensure that the default /apps/ folder only contains apps shipped with Nextcloud, follow this example to setup an /extra-apps/ folder which will be used to store any additional apps you install:

"apps_paths" => [
    [
            "path"     => OC::$SERVERROOT . "/apps",
            "url"      => "/apps",
            "writable" => false,
    ],
    [
            "path"     => OC::$SERVERROOT . "/extra-apps",
            "url"      => "/extra-apps",
            "writable" => true,
    ],
],

Danger

Make sure that the values you choose for path and url for any custom apps directories do not conflict with directories which already exist in your Nextcloud Server root (installation directory).

Tip

Apps paths can be located outside the server root. However, for any path outside the server root, you need to create a symbolic link in the server root that points url to path. For instance, if path is /var/local/lib/nextcloud/extra-apps, and url is /extra-apps, then you would use the command ln to create the symbolic link like this: ln -sf /var/local/lib/nextcloud/extra-apps ./extra-apps

Using a self hosted apps store

Enables the installation of apps from a self hosted apps store. Requires that at least one of the configured apps directories is writeable.

To enable a self hosted apps store:

Set the appstoreenabled parameter to “true”.

This parameter is used to enable the apps store in Nextcloud.
Set the appstoreurl to the URL of your Nextcloud apps store.

This parameter is used to set the http path to your self hosted Nextcloud apps store.

"appstoreenabled" => true,
"appstoreurl" => "https://my.appstore.instance/v1",

By default the apps store is enabled and configured to use https://apps.nextcloud.com/api/v1 as apps store url. Nextcloud will fetch apps.json and categories.json from there. To use the defaults again remove appstoreenabled and appstoreurl from the configuration.

Example: If categories.json is available at https://apps.nextcloud.com/api/v1/categories.json the apps store url is https://apps.nextcloud.com/api/v1.