Apps management

Nextcloud apps can enhance, customize, or restrict the features and experience available to you and your users on the Nextcloud server. In addition to built-in apps such as Files, Activity, and Photos, other apps such as Calendar, Contacts, and Talk can further expand its functionality.

After installing the Nextcloud server, you might want to consider enabling, disabling, or restricting some apps for specific groups, depending on your needs and those of your users.

Apps

Apps page for enabling and disabling 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 a Featured tag.

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.

On 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.

Select an app to view its description and available configuration options. 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.

Update notifications

The default updatenotification app sends administrators notifications about 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. when using the guests app, guest users are not notified. To enable notifications for them use:

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

Managing apps with occ

In addition to managing apps via the web interface, administrators can enable or disable apps with 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 a third-party app uses private APIs instead of public APIs, installation fails when '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 set up 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,
    ],
],

Configuring the app store timeout

The timeout for requests to fetch app store metadata can be configured with the appstore-timeout app setting. The value is specified in seconds. This setting is configured with occ and is not a config.php parameter.

For example, to set the timeout to 180 seconds:

occ config:app:set settings appstore-timeout --value=180

The default timeout is 120 seconds. To restore the default, remove the custom setting:

occ config:app:delete settings appstore-timeout

Using a self-hosted app store

This section explains how to enable installation of apps from a self-hosted app store. At least one of the configured apps directories must be writable.

To enable a self-hosted app store:

  1. Set the appstoreenabled parameter to true.

    This parameter is used to enable the app store in Nextcloud.

  2. Set the appstoreurl to the URL of your Nextcloud app store.

    This parameter is used to set the HTTP path to your self-hosted Nextcloud app store.

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

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

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