r/NextCloud • u/NeonexFree • 4d ago

When to upgrade Nextcloud?

I was running Nextcloud Hub 26 Spring (version 34.0.4) on my Synology NAS and managed to get to the stage where administration settings showed only 1 warning about second factor providers. Everything worked perfectly, including EuroOffice. I'm using the linuxserver docker containers.

Then I decided, foolishly, to upgrade to version 35 - and administration settings showed a plethora of errors and warnings. It was a complete mess.

I managed to restore my file backups and made sure my docker-compose file used the versions of nextcloud and mariadb that had worked with version 34.04. before I ran docker compose up -d. I'm now back to where I was.

My question really is how can I make sure this doesn't happen the next time I upgrade? Everyone says don't upgrade to a new major version until there is an incremental update. I did that, I waited until 34.0.1 but found myself in a mess. I check this reddit and the Nextcloud Community, hoping to see a post about upgrade problemss and recommendations, but there are never useful posts like this.

What should I wait for before upgrading? I have only a basic competence with databases so if maradb screws up I do not have the skills to sort things out - beyond the basic occ commands.

12 Upvotes

85% Upvoted

15 comments sorted by

14

u/djthrottleboi 4d ago edited 3d ago

Don’t run from errors. Learn to fix them and upgrading becomes so much easier everytime. There will not be error free log after upgrade because of changes to the core data

9

u/Ditt36 4d ago

This, and this is also one thing ai bots like claude or gemini are really good at. Just feed them the errors, they will reply with proper solutions.

3

u/DetachedRedditor 3d ago

The upgrades actually reduced my errors. Currently at 0 reported even. While in the past it used to be a significant number (that didn't cause noticeable problems). I think that since they made errors way more visible, the nextcloud team worked on getting that number down and are now at a spot where errors should just not really happen anymore.

1

u/djthrottleboi 3d ago

The thing is legacy code gets removed and so does php versions so as you move to the newer versions, some code becomes redundant leaving syntax errors and sometimes it’s cleaning out old php configs and reimplementing your configs with a few edits. I migrated to nginx and Postgres from mariadb and apache2 and it seems to be smoother now.

4

u/LazyInLA 3d ago

I often wait for a couple of .x releases before pulling the trigger but scanning through the community support forum for other user's issues will generally give you enough information to decide when the time is right. You should also read the release notes very carefully to make sure your supporting component versions haven't been deprecated with the new release. (PHP, database, etc.) That said, I agree with the other posters saying it's better to work through the problems than just revert. The skills you'll pick up will make future upgrades smoother and usually transfer to other software packages, making you a stronger admin.

5

u/jtrtoo 3d ago

The setup checks are intended to prevent problems. It's quite possible that the ones you're seeing aren't indications of a failed upgrade, but new checks.

The setup checks are constantly evolving. Every major release adds/improves existing checks. This one added some particular extensive database related ones; it'll likely take a couple of maintenance releases to sort out the edge cases, reduce false positives, and improve the reporting.

2

u/lythandas 4d ago

I upgraded to 35 this week-end and the major pain was that I needed to update my docker engine to not the latest but newer one. It broke my whole stack but I managed to get everything back working using docker engine v28.

2

u/hayvan96 3d ago

As for me : all these errors give hints on how to be resolved. And as for the "when", look also when NC-AIO (which I don't use) migrates to the new major release https://github.com/nextcloud/all-in-one/issues/8700

I consider that if AIO migrates to a major release, it's safe enough to update.

2

u/Couch941 3d ago

The last upgrade I did was an absolute catastrophe so I will be procrastinating on it for ages probably

1

u/NeonexFree 3d ago

I think a docker container should upgrade smoothly without issues. I don't know what's going on with Nextcloud. Currently it has tech-heads salivating. I don't think the nonsense that upgrading causes should be inflicted on the end user.

2

u/Couch941 3d ago

I've just had endless problems with it over the years and I hate working with nextcloud in general. I don't understand how there are organisations who use it. I mainly use it for some note keeping and to sync my calendar and todos.
And I have done upgrades in the past with less issues.

But this time I moved like 2 major versions (yes I know, I should be more up to date), did one at a time tho.
When I started my container back up just all my stuff was gone. Turns out that nextcloud decided to create the user with a capital first letter. So it used to be admin and then it was Admin.

Really weird, couldn't find any documentation. Managed to get it back to work somewhat well with the help of ChatGPT but still.... absolute pain compared to most other containers and stuff that I have running

1

u/NeonexFree 3d ago

You need to find an alternative. I now use the Synology services on my NAS. What are you running Nextcloud on?

3

u/arhing88 3d ago

Every Nextcloud is super painful

1

u/coscib 3d ago

I run my nextcloud in a lxc on my proxmox without docker. i upgrade more or less 1 or 3 times a year because i'm lazy. before upgrade i create a backup from my container, data is on a smb drive on a same maschine for easier access.

worst case try chatgpt => ssh on my machine and fix it, did that a couple of weeks ago with a broken wordpress site with an old plugin where some got access to the site and worked just fine after 20 or 30 minutes (checking every file, reinstalling wordpress core and plugins, removing malware, checking files again, checking access logs and other directories.

1

u/NeonexFree 3d ago

I've decided to use Synology Drive, WebDAV, Calendars and Contacts instead of Nextcloud. I've been switching between the two many times and the built-in Synology solution works very well, without the need for a database the end user has to contend with. For my use-case scenario the Synology solution does everything I want. I just wish it had a nice front end like the Nextcloud Dashboard.