#Services

Five deployables, two languages. Why they are separate is in How the pieces fit.

Supporting containers: Nextcloud, MariaDB, Redis, the OnlyOffice documentserver, and a Nextcloud cron container.

demo-video/ is the seventh directory and the only deliverable that is not a service: a Remotion (React → MP4) demo film.

mcp-groupware/ is the retired stdio predecessor of mcp-nextcloud. Nothing imports it. It is untracked in git, so deleting it is unrecoverable — commit it first if it ever goes.

#Videoconferencing

Nextcloud Talk, with the community high performance backend. Three containers behind the talk compose profile — they do not start with a plain docker compose up -d.

Without the backend, Talk still works — peer-to-peer mesh, which degrades past about five participants, on the worst-connected client, and logs nothing server-side. That is the whole reason these three exist.

Talk replaced Jitsi. Jitsi had no room API at all, so a room's only protection was a secret in its URL, and its account directory (prosody) was unrelated to Nextcloud's. Talk has an OCS API with a participant list: Nextcloud decides who joins, which is the project's central invariant.

Single instance, so no NATS container: NATS_URL=nats://loopback makes the signaling server process those messages internally. NATS only distributes messages between several signaling instances.

Setup is not automatic. Paste https://TALK_HOSTNAME and TALK_SIGNALING_SECRET into Nextcloud → Administration settings → Talk → Signaling server. Until that is done Talk stays on peer-to-peer and never says so.

Media leaves outside Caddy — an HTTP proxy does not relay UDP — so GCP ingress rules are required for udp:20000-20099, udp:20100-20149 and tcp:3478,udp:3478. The ranges are deliberately narrow: every published port costs a docker-proxy process, and width is firewall surface.

#Environment

Four values have no sensible default:

The talk profile adds five more. They are interpolated as ${VAR:-} rather than ${VAR:?} on purpose — compose interpolates the whole file before it filters profiles, so a :? guard on a service the active profile excludes breaks docker compose up -d for anyone not running video. The cost is that empty means empty: the image's entrypoint sees nothing to substitute and leaves the upstream template's public demonstration values in server.conf. The check therefore belongs in the script that turns videoconferencing on, not in compose.

A direct provider key (GEMINI_API_KEY, OPENAI_API_KEY) takes precedence over the gateway for that provider. Leave it empty otherwise — and note that empty means empty: ${VAR:-} in compose passes an empty string rather than nothing.

Other variables of interest:

#Two names for the same server, twice

Swapping either pair breaks things silently. → why

#Setup scripts

All idempotent. Re-run after changing anything they touch.

#Nextcloud from the command line

Everything goes through occ inside the container:

docker exec -u www-data nextcloud-ai-nextcloud-1 php occ status
docker exec -u www-data nextcloud-ai-nextcloud-1 php occ app:enable tamebi
docker exec -u www-data nextcloud-ai-nextcloud-1 php occ user:add --display-name "…" --email … <uid>
docker exec -u www-data nextcloud-ai-nextcloud-1 php occ user:setting <uid> settings email <address>

Setting an account's email is what publishes it into Nextcloud's system address book, which is where the agent finds a colleague's address instead of inventing one. Nothing fails without it; the agent simply cannot resolve people.

#Tests

mcp-nextcloud's test script lists its files explicitly — a new test file is silently skipped until it is added there.