In the previous post of this series, we discussed the process of and lessons learned from building Apache for the Nextcloud snap. Nextcloud is a web application written in PHP, so for this post we’ll focus on getting PHP into the snap. PHP 7, like Apache, is included in the Ubuntu archives. However, I was planning on using the PHP Apache module, and since I was building Apache from source, I figured there’d be a lot of hoops for me to jump through if I tried to shoehorn the ....

The backbone of any web application is of course the web server, so that’s where I started when snapping Nextcloud. I went with Apache as opposed to Nginx for two reasons: 1) Apache is recommended by Nextcloud (the v9 docs that I used when making this decision are lost to the dust of time, but Apache is still the recommended option in v21), and 2) I’m much more familiar with Apache than Nginx....

I’ve been an ownCloud user for years, and I recently moved to using Nextcloud, which is based upon ownCloud. Both my wife and I use it to sync our calendars and contacts across all our devices, and also use it to sync our documents, music, pictures, and videos. It caters to my paranoid nature– the idea that all that information is being saved on my own in-house server instead of someone else’s greatly pleases me....

I’m currently the maintainer of the ownCloud snap. One of the primary target devices for this snap is a Raspberry Pi 2, which is of course armhf. Snapcraft solves a lot of problems when building snaps, but one issue it doesn’t solve is cross-building (i.e. building on one architecture while targeting another). Back in Snappy Ubuntu Core 15.04, every ownCloud release I made for armhf was built on the Raspberry Pi 2....

So you’re a roboticist, looking at Ubuntu Core and Snappy, trying to decide if they’re a good fit for your project. You come across some ROS documentation and realize that the ROS support is first-class, but you’re not using ROS. No, you’re using the Mission Oriented Operating Suite (MOOS). Why is there no documentation on using MOOS? Because it’s too easy to need a document, that’s why (update: this remains true, but we wrote a quick one anyway)....