Gitpedia

Desktop

๐Ÿ’ป Desktop sync client for Nextcloud

From nextcloudยทUpdated May 30, 2026ยทView on GitHubยท

The Nextcloud Desktop Client is an app to synchronize files from Nextcloud Server with your computer available for Windows, macOS and Linux. The project is written primarily in C++, distributed under the GNU General Public License v2.0 license, first published in 2017. It has gained significant community traction with 3,729 stars and 953 forks on GitHub. Key topics include: c-plus-plus, cpp, desktop, hacktoberfest, linux.

Latest release: v33.0.5โ€” Release 33.0.5
<!-- - SPDX-FileCopyrightText: 2017 Nextcloud GmbH and Nextcloud contributors - SPDX-FileCopyrightText: 2011 Nextcloud GmbH and Nextcloud contributors - SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-2.0-or-later -->

Nextcloud Desktop Client

REUSE status

The Nextcloud Desktop Client is an app to synchronize files from Nextcloud Server with your computer available for Windows, macOS and Linux.

<p align="center"> <img src="doc/images/main_dialog_christine.png" alt="Desktop Client on Windows" width="450"> </p>

Downloads ๐Ÿš€

For the latest stable and recommended version, please refer to the official download page.

Help ๐Ÿ›Ÿ

You can find the user, administration and developer manuals for the desktop client on our central documentation site.

Contributing ๐Ÿซด

:v: Please read the Code of Conduct. This document offers some guidance to ensure Nextcloud participants can cooperate effectively in a positive and inspiring atmosphere and to explain how together we can strengthen and support each other.

Join the team ๐Ÿ‘ช

There are many ways to contribute, of which development is only one! Find out how to get involved, including as a translator, designer, tester, helping others, and much more! ๐Ÿ˜

Help testing ๐Ÿ”ฌ

Download and install the client:

Reporting issues ๐Ÿ›

If you find any bugs or have any suggestion for improvement, please
open an issue in this repository.

Bug fixing and development ๐Ÿ› ๏ธ

[!TIP]
For contributors on macOS, see the macOS development guide.

[!NOTE]
Find the system requirements and instructions on how to work on Windows with KDE Craft on our desktop client blueprints repository.

System requirements

Optional recommendations:

Build

Step by step instructions on how to build the client to contribute.

  1. Clone the Github repository: git clone https://github.com/nextcloud/desktop.git
  2. Create build directory: mkdir <build directory>
  3. Navigate into build directory: cd <build directory>
  4. Compile: cmake -S <cloned desktop repo> -B build -DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH=<dependencies> -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=. -DNEXTCLOUD_DEV=ON

[!TIP]
The cmake variable NEXTCLOUD_DEV allows you to run your own build of the client while developing in parallel with an installed version of the client.

Then you might continue with these steps:

  1. ๐Ÿ› Pick a good first issue
  2. ๐Ÿ‘ฉโ€๐Ÿ”ง Create a branch and make your changes. Remember to sign off your commits using git commit -sm "Your commit message"
  3. โฌ† Create a pull request and @mention the people from the issue to eview
  4. ๐Ÿ‘ Fix things that come up during a review
  5. ๐ŸŽ‰ Wait for it to get merged!

Test servers

The easiest way to have a local Nextcloud server to develop, debug and test the client against is the Nextcloud Docker image.
The following example shows how to deploy a Nextcloud Docker container on the local host which will be removed again as soon as the command is interrupted.
Note that this requires Docker to be installed in your developer environment.

bash
docker run \ --rm \ --publish 8080:80 \ --env SQLITE_DATABASE=nextcloud.sqlite \ --env NEXTCLOUD_ADMIN_USER=admin \ --env NEXTCLOUD_ADMIN_PASSWORD=admin \ nextcloud

This simple test server already suffices in the most cases. For more advanced server test deployments we also recommend Nextcloud development environment on Docker Compose.

Get in touch ๐Ÿ’ฌ

You can also get professional support for Nextcloud and the desktop client!

License ๐Ÿ“œ

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but
WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY
or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License
for more details.

Contributors

Showing top 12 contributors by commit count.

View all contributors on GitHub โ†’

This article is auto-generated from nextcloud/desktop via the GitHub API.Last fetched: 5/31/2026