Develop your own Nextcloud Apps: Check out our new tutorials!

Whether you’re an amateur, experienced or an expert developer, our tutorials will prepare you for developing apps for Nextcloud.

We focus on open source app development and are commited to providing our community all the tools they need to transform their ideas into real Nextcloud apps.

Why Nextcloud Apps?

Jump start 🚀

Nextcloud offers you the basics to build your app upon. Authentication, file handling and sharing, access control, mobile and desktop clients – don’t worry about that, we got you covered!

Open source 💙

It’s all open source, so you can draw inspiration from the code of other apps.

Strong community 👩‍💻

Be part of the awesome open-source community that is welcoming, encouraging and like a family.

Big Audience 🌍

There are between 200-300k Nextcloud servers on the web. The most downloaded apps on our app store are installed on over 100k servers and have millions of users!

Free promotion 📢

If you create an app, extension or integration, Nextcloud will help you promote it. We are happy to work with you!

Business opportunity 🙌

If you build an app, script, extension or tool as a business endeavor, we will be happy to support your effort. We love our ecosystem and want you to benefit from it!

So what are you waiting for?

Read on to discover our brand new Nextcloud App development tutorials! ⤵️

Developing a complete app

If you have a groundbreaking idea for an app, now’s your chance to develop it from scratch!

In this tutorial, you will learn how to develop a complete app with a navigation bar and database.

After the tutorial you will know how to:

  • Create a stand-alone app with a navigation menu
  • Use the database
  • Extend Nextcloud’s API with your app’s endpoints
  • Export data that is stored by your app in the database to a file

Add automated tests to your app

After you’ve set up your own app, you can learn how to configure automated tests for it!

Learn how to use GitHub Actions – a continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform allowing you to automate your development workflow. With GitHub Actions, app developers don’t have to deploy a test environment for all the different Nextcloud, PHP and database system versions.

You’ll see just how convenient it is to have tests being triggered automatically so they are running for each pull request.

GitHub Actions

After the tutorial you will know how to:

  • Use GitHub Actions to set up a specific Nextcloud test environment
  • Configure which tests to run
  • Implement tests
  • See if the tests ran successfully

Basic troubleshooting techniques

Coding

Is your app not functioning as expected? Do you not know why the code is not working properly?

This tutorial will teach you how to:

  • Restart your Nextcloud instance
  • Access the browser console
  • Get the Nextcloud.log file

EXTRA: Set up a test environment – Reproducing bugs and testing PR’s

For those working on the core of Nextcloud, you can learn how to set up an easy test environment using Simon’s Nextcloud Easy Test Instance.

This is a super quick instance using docker for Nextcloud to quickly launch different versions of Nextcloud which is great for reproducing bugs, testing PR’s, and user testing UX changes.

After this tutorial you will know how to:

  • Set up a local Nextcloud environment for testing purposes
  • Test PR’s for Nextcloud
  • Quickly reproduce bugs on different Nextcloud versions and get logs
  • Set up multiple environments for user testing UX changes

Develop for Nextcloud

See all of our developer tutorials, featured apps, and more!

Learn more