AjaXplorer on Raspberry Pi, an alternative to Owncloud

Among the many possibilities of Raspberry Pi, It has to have its own Cloud with the famous Owncloud. Yet there are alternatives that allow to store and share your files. Today we test AjaXplorer.

Features are numerous and can be extended with many plugins. The list is long, too much to be detailed here but in outline, You can :

• Access your documents from the Internet,
• Display documents stored as images, the PDF, Office files, music, etc.
• There are iOS and Android native applications to access your data
• Indexing of documents for a quick search
• Creation of mini public site to share certain documents
• A simplified administration
• Notifications on shares, their access, etc.
• It is possible to integrate it into the CMS WordPress, Joomla and Drupal for authentication

And that's not counting on many existing plugins available here.

If you want to try before you install it you can visit the official site of ajaXplorer, on this page.

So now here we are to install it on our favorite Raspberry !

1. Update the system

   apt-get update && apt-get -y upgrade

2. Install the web server Nginx with PHP support. You will find instructions on this page.
3. Create the directory which will contain ajaXplorer

   mkdir /var/www

4. Download the latest version of ajaXplorer on this page. Here is the link I used :

   wget "http://downloads.sourceforge.NET/project/ajaxplorer/ajaxplorer/stable-channel/5.0.2/ajaxplorer-core-5.0.2.zip?r = http://sourceforge.net/projects/ajaxplorer/files/ajaxplorer/stable-channel/5.0.2/&TS = 1376426236&use_mirror = freefr" -O ajaxplorer.zip

5. Copy the ajaxplorer.tar.gz file to the destination directory

   CP ajaxplorer.zip/var/www

6. Unpack the archive

   cd/var/www unzip ajaxplorer.zip cd ajaxplorer-core-5.0.2 mv * ..
   MV .* ..
   cd..
   rm - rf ajaxplorer-core - 5.0.2

7. Change the rights of the tree :

   chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www

8. Configure Nginx in the file/etc/nginx/sites-available/ajaxplorer

   server {
   	listen 8080;
   	root /var/www;
   	index index.php;
   	access_log /var/log/nginx/ajaxplorer.access.log;
   	error_log /var/log/nginx/ajaxplorer.error.log;
   	location / {
   	}
   	rental ~ * \.(?:ICO|CSS|JS|gif|jpe?g|PNG)$ {
   		expires max;
   	}
   	rental /conf/       { deny all; }
   	rental /data/       { deny all; }
   	rental ~ /\.          { deny all; }
   	rental ~ ~ $           { deny all; }
   	location ~ .php$ {
   		fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/PHP5-fpm.sock;
   		fastcgi_index index.php;
   		include fastcgi_params;
   	}
   }

9. Enable the configuration and restart Nginx

   ln-s/etc/nginx/sites-available/ajaxplorer/etc/nginx/sites-enabled/ajaxplorer service nginx restart

10. To follow the recommendations, you need to disable the PHP by replacing output_buffering option in /etc/php5/fpm/php.ini the line

    output_buffering = 4096

    by

    output_buffering = Off

11. Don't forget to change the local stuff in French (and reboot if necessary). By accessing the Raspberry :
    
12. You have to follow the installation wizard to configure the environment. Damage, not even in French (or I have not found how to do despite the local in French). In Global Options you can choose the post installation language.
    For storage, I chose not to use MySQL to gain performance CPU.
    Attention password must be a minimum length to enable the install button.
    
13. You will then arrive at the login screen :
    
14. You arrive at the main page of the tool :
    

I'll let you read the documentation on the use of ajaXplorer. What is really important is the plugins that will allow you to preview a lot of files : images, PDF, doc, MP3, etc.

Important point : When you send files you are limited to 2 M. To change this limit, make you in the /etc/php5/fpm/php.ini file and change the following values in the limits you want to impose :

post_max_size = 8M upload_max_filesize = 2M

You say what you think of this tool and if it can replace your Owncloud installation.