Command Line Installation

ownCloud can be installed entirely from the command line. This is convenient for scripted operations and for systems administrators who prefer using the command line over a GUI. It involves five steps:

Let’s begin. To install ownCloud, first download the source (whether community or enterprise) directly from ownCloud, and then unpack (decompress) the tarball into the appropriate directory.

With that done, you next need to set your webserver user to be the owner of your unpacked owncloud directory, as in the example below.

$ sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/owncloud/

With those steps completed, next use the occ command, from the root directory of the ownCloud source, to perform the installation. This removes the need to run the Graphical Installation Wizard. Here’s an example of how to do it

# Assuming you’ve unpacked the source to /var/www/owncloud/
$ cd /var/www/owncloud/
$ sudo -u www-data php occ maintenance:install \
   --database "mysql" --database-name "owncloud" \
   --database-user "root" --database-pass "password" \
   --admin-user "admin" --admin-pass "password"

If you want to use a directory other than the default (which is data inside the root ownCloud directory), you can also supply the --data-dir switch. For example, if you were using the command above and you wanted the data directory to be /opt/owncloud/data, then add --data-dir /opt/owncloud/data to the command.

When the command completes, apply the correct permissions to your ownCloud files and directories.