ownCloud Administrators Manual

Configuring Server-to-Server Sharing

ownCloud 7 introduces a powerful new feature, server-to-server sharing. With just a few clicks you can easily and securely create public shares for sharing files and directories with other ownCloud 7 (and newer versions) servers. You can automatically send an email notification when you create the share, add password protection, allow users to upload files, and set an expiration date.

Note

This is called Federated Cloud Sharing in ownCloud 8. You may create shares with oC8 servers, following the steps below using public link shares. oC8 also supports creating the share using the Share with user or group form field. This is not supported in oC7 and you must use public link shares on both servers.

Follow these steps to create a new public share:

  1. Go to the Admin page and scroll to the Remote Shares section.
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2. To enable server-to-server sharing, and to allow remote users to mount your shares in their ownCloud 7 accounts, check Allow other instances to mount public links shared from this server. Leaving the checkbox blank disables server-to-server sharing.

3. You can enable the users on your local ownCloud server to mount public link shares by checking Allow users to mount public link shares. When this is not checked your users cannot mount public link shares, though they can view and download them.

4. Now go to your Files page and hover your cursor over the file or directory you want to share to expose the administration options. Check the Share Link checkbox to create the share, and to expose all of your sharing options.

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Your new public share is labeled with a chain link. If you do not protect it with a password, it is visible to anyone who has the URL. Users on other ownCloud 7 servers can mount it and use it just like any ownCloud share.

Un-check the Share Link checkbox to disable the share.

See “Using Server-to-Server Sharing” in the Users Manual to learn how to connect to a remote public share.

Notes

Your Apache Web server must have mod_rewrite enabled, and you must have trusted_domains configured in config.php. Consider also enabling SSL to encrypt all traffic between your servers. (See Manual Installation on Linux to learn more about mod_rewrite, SSL, and alternative HTTP servers. See Installation Wizard to learn more about configuring trusted domains.)

Self-signed certificates for Server-to-Server Sharing are currently not supported.

Your ownCloud server creates the share link from the URL that you used to log into the server, so make sure that you log into your server using a URL that is accessible to your users. For example, if you log in via its LAN IP address, such as http://192.168.10.50, then your share URL will be something like http://192.168.10.50/owncloud/public.php?service=files&t= 6b6fa9a714a32ef0af8a83dde358deec, which is not accessible outside of your LAN. This also applies to using the server name; for access outside of your LAN you need to use a fully-qualified domain name such as http://myserver.example.com, rather than http://myserver.