Patching Nextcloud

Applying a patch

Patching server

  1. Navigate into your Nextcloud server’s root directory (contains the status.php file)

  2. Now apply the patch with the following command:

    patch -p 1 < /path/to/the/file.patch
    

Note

There can be errors about not found files, especially when you take a patch from GitHub there might be development or test files included in the patch. when the files are in build/ or a tests/ subdirectory it is mostly being

Patching apps

  1. Navigate to the root of this app (mostly apps/[APPID]/), if you can not find the app there use the sudo -u www-data php occ app:getpath APPID command to find the path.

  2. Now apply the patch with the same command as in Patching server

Reverting a patch

  1. Navigate to the directory where you applied the patch.

  2. Now revert the patch with the -R option:

    patch -R -p 1 < /path/to/the/file.patch
    

Getting a patch from a GitHub pull request

If you found a related pull request on GitHub that solves your issue, or you want to help developers and verify a fix works, you can get a patch for the pull request.

  1. Using https://github.com/nextcloud/server/pull/26396 as an example.

  2. Append .patch to the URL: https://github.com/nextcloud/server/pull/26396.patch

  3. Download the patch to your server and follow the Applying a patch steps.

  4. In case you are on an older version, you might first need to go the the correct version of the patch.

backportbot-nextcloud linking to the pull request for an older version.
  1. You can find it by looking for a link by the backportbot-nextcloud or a developer will leave a manual comment about the backport to an older Nextcloud version. For the example above you the pull request for Nextcloud 21 is at https://github.com/nextcloud/server/pull/26406 and the patch at https://github.com/nextcloud/server/pull/26406.patch