The ownCloud product Infinite Scale is going to be released in version five soon. The latest stable version is 4.0.5 and I am sure everybody checked it out already and is blown away by it’s performance, elegance and ease of use.
No, not yet?
Ok, well, in that case, here comes rescue: With the little script described here, it becomes really easy to start Infinite Scale to check it out on your computer. It makes it really easy and quick for you, without Linux super admin powers whatsoever.
To use it, you just need to open a terminal on your machine and cd into a directory somewhere in your home where you can afford to host some bytes.
Without further preparation, you type the following command line (NOT as user root please):
curl -L https://owncloud.com/runocis.sh | /bin/bash
What it does is that it automatically pulls the latest stable version of Infinite Scale from the official download server of ownCloud onto your computer. For that, it creates a configuration and a start script, and starts the server. The script detects the platform on which your’re running to download the right binary version. It also looks up the hostname and configures the installation for that name.
Once the server was started Infinite Scale’s web client can be accessed by pointing a browser to the URL https://your-hostname:9200/. Since this is an installation for testing purposes, it does not have a proper certificate configured. That is why your browser is complaining about the cert, and you have to calm it. And indeed, that is one of the reasons why you’re not supposed to use this sneak peak in production or even exposed to the internet.
For the nerds, the script does not really do magic, but just curls the golang single binary of Infinite Scale down to the machine into a sandbox directory, chmod it to be executable and create a working config and a data dir. All happens with the priviledges of the logged in user, no sudo or root involved. You’re encouraged to double check the install script using for example the command curl -L https://owncloud.com/runocis.sh | less - of course you never should trust anybody running scripts from the internet on your machine.
If the server is stopped by pressing Ctrl-C, it later can be started again by the script runocis.sh that was kindly left behind in the sandbox as well.
The installer was tested on these three platforms: 64 bit AMD/Intel CPU based Linux machines, 64 bit Raspberry Pi with Raspbian OS and MacOSX. The flavour of Linux should not make a difference.
If you encounter a problem with the script or if you have suggestions to improve, please find it in my this’n that section on Github. I am happy to receive issue reports or pull requests.
For further information and setups suitable for production please refer to the Infinite Scale documentation.