Use your Raspberry Pi as Cloud – Part 2

In my recent article I showed you how to use OwnCloud for your Raspberry Pi. This is not the only cloud service that runs on your Pi! An alternatice is another open source cloud service called Seafile.

Seafile

Seafile is a real alternative to OwnCloud. Seafile can be used free as community edition and there is also a commercial version which is called SeaCloud service. You can find a list of all additional features of this commercial version here. Before you install Seafile, you should install or update some needed packets with your packet manager:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install python2.7 python-setuptools python-simplejson python-imaging sqlite3

Installation

Seafile is a stand alone program and does not run as a service on your Apache web server. With this in mind, it is a good idea to create a own user that runs this program. Follow my instructions of how to install Seafile into your (or the new users) home directory. It is a good idea to create a new directory called ’seafile‘ or so:

wget http://seafile.googlecode.com/files/seafile-server_1.5.1_pi.tar.gz
tar -xzf seafile-server_*
mkdir installed
mv seafile-server_* installed
cd seafile-server-*
./setup-seafile.sh

With this commands, you can get the program and unzip it. The last command starts the installation script. This is interactive and easy to use. Follow the instructions!

Configuration

You can start Seafile with a script, that can be found in the main directory of Seafile. You can start it with:

sudo ./seafile.sh start
sudo ./seahub.sh start

You do not need to do this manually each time you restart your Raspberry Pi. You can automate this: see my article.

The service can be used with a normal browser. Just type http://192.168.1.10:8000 into your address bar. You should change the IP address with that of your Rasbperry. As you can see, this service uses port 8000, so you may configure this port on your router.

Conclusion

OwnClound and Seafile are different services for the same job. I do not want to give a detailed analyzation of pros and cons. Just remember this:

OwnCloud is the weaker solution. It is less save and on your Raspberry Pi, it is not very fast. Seafile is faster, more secure but also a bit buggy. Sometimes Seafile does not start because of errors.

Both systems are in sum really good and useful on your Raspberry Pi. This comparison was done with the current versions. Maybe OwnCloud gets an update and is now faster… however, both cloud systems are an overvalue for Raspberry Pi users and I hope they are further developed.

Part 1