Getting Started

We have an oCIS demo instance running on ocis.owncloud.com where you can get a first impression of it.

We also have some more variations of oCIS running and continuously deployed to reflect different scenarios in that oCIS might be used.

We are distributing oCIS as binaries and Docker images.

The examples in this document assume that oCIS is accessed from the same host as it is running on (localhost). If you would like to access oCIS remotely please refer to the Basic Remote Setup section. Especially to the notes about setting the PROXY_HTTP_ADDR and OCIS_URL environment variables.

You can find more deployment examples in the deployment section.

You can find the latest official release of oCIS at our download mirror or on GitHub. The latest build from the master branch can be found at our download mirrors daily section. Pre-Releases are available at our download mirrors testing section.

To run oCIS as binary you need to download it first and then run the following commands. For this example, assuming version 2.0.0-beta.5 of oCIS running on a Linux AMD64 host:

# download
curl https://download.owncloud.com/ocis/ocis/testing/2.0.0-beta.5/ocis-2.0.0-beta.5-linux-amd64 --output ocis

# make binary executable
chmod +x ocis

# initialize a minimal oCIS configuration
./ocis init

# run with demo users
IDM_CREATE_DEMO_USERS=true ./ocis server

The default primary storage location is ~/.ocis or /var/lib/ocis depending on the packaging format and your operating system user. You can change that value by configuration.

When you’re using oCIS with self-signed certificates, you need to answer the question for certificate checking with “yes” or set the environment variable OCIS_INSECURE=true, in order to make oCIS work.

oCIS by default relies on Multicast DNS (mDNS), usually via avahi-daemon. If your system has a firewall, make sure mDNS is allowed in your active zone.

Open Files on macOS

The start command ./ocis server starts a runtime which runs all oCIS services in one process. On MacOS we have very low limits for open files. oCIS needs more than the default 256. Please raise the limit to 1024 by typing ulimit -n 1024 within the same cli session where you start ocis from.

Docker images for oCIS are available on Docker Hub.

The latest tag always reflects the current master branch.

docker pull owncloud/ocis
docker run --rm -it -v ocis-config:/etc/ocis owncloud/ocis init
docker run --rm -p 9200:9200 -v ocis-config:/etc/ocis -v ocis-data:/var/lib/ocis -e IDM_CREATE_DEMO_USERS=true owncloud/ocis

When you’re using oCIS with self-signed certificates, you need to set the environment variable OCIS_INSECURE=true, in order to make oCIS work.

When you’re creating the demo users by setting IDM_CREATE_DEMO_USERS=true, you need to be sure that this instance is not used in production because the passwords are public.

We are using named volumes for the oCIS configuration and oCIS data in the above example (-v ocis-config:/etc/ocis -v ocis-data:/var/lib/ocis). You could instead also use host bind-mounts instead, eg. -v /some/host/dir:/var/lib/ocis.

You cannot use bind mounts on MacOS, since extended attributes are not supported (owncloud/ocis#182, moby/moby#1070).

Open https://localhost:9200 and login using one of the demo accounts.

The oCIS single binary contains multiple extensions and the ocis command helps you to manage them. You already used ocis server to run all available extensions in the Run oCIS section. We now will show you some more management commands, which you may also explore by typing ocis --help or going to the docs.

To initialize the oCIS configuration:

ocis init

To start oCIS server:

ocis server

The list command prints all running oCIS services.

ocis list

The version command prints the version of your installed oCIS.

ocis --version

The health command is used to execute a health check, if the exit code equals zero the service should be up and running, if the exit code is greater than zero the service is not in a healthy state. Generally this command is used within our Docker containers, it could also be used within Kubernetes.

ocis health --help