Secure first time setup of nextcloud

Question

I want to setup a Nextcloud on my personal VPS. To do the first time setup, I have to access the webserver via my browser and it says I should do it over http://localhost/nextcloud/ ( Nextcloud Installation Wizard (Right in the beginning), but this does not work for my because the VPS is not my local machine. So I have to open up the setup website to the public web and everybody who would know the IP of my VPS could do it first time setup. I read other tutorials from web applications (for example Confluence Confluence Installation Documentation (Point 4.2)) where this is the common way of setting things up the first time. Is there another secure way to do this in general for setting up an webapp for the first time? Firewall? VPN? How do you guys do it?

Thank you for your help

Answer 1

Yes - this is the common way on how to set it up. In the unlikely case that somebody else sets it up in the short time between placing the files and running the installer, you could also remove the config/config.php and do the setup again.

If you want to not do the web based setup you could use the CLI tool to run the installation. It also asks in an interactive way to set up Nextcloud or all the parameters can be provided via CLI options.

See https://docs.nextcloud.com/server/12/admin_manual/installation/command_line_installation.html for more details on the CLI installation method.