This is a perfect example of banging your head against the wall for a day. Integration information between FreeIPA and just about anything is hard to come by, so I decided to put this short guide together covering it and Nextcloud. This is just a drop in a bucket that desperately needs to be filled. As always, I will endeavour to explain how I figured this out because understanding the how and why is important! Ultimately this investigation resulted in me tracking down a bug in the LDAP app in Nextcloud, and a patch has been merged for the Nextcloud 12 release.
You’ll require a read-only System account in your FreeIPA instance. This is for Nextcloud to bind to for reading users and groups. Basic instructions for creating a user for this purpose are located here on the FreeIPA wiki.
With this in hand and the LDAP / AD Integration app enabled in your Nextcloud instance you can get to configuring. You should be aware of some of your basic configuration settings in FreeIPA, like your basedn which you can find in /etc/ipa/default.conf on your IPA server.
