Nextcloud 12 Server Administration Manual

How to Upgrade¶

There are three ways to upgrade your Nextcloud server:

With the Updater App.
Manually upgrading with the Nextcloud .tar archive from our Download page.
Upgrading via the snap packages.
Manually upgrading is also an option for users on shared hosting; download and unpack the Nextcloud tarball to your PC. Delete your existing Nextcloud files, except data/ and config/ files, on your hosting account. Then transfer the new Nextcloud files to your hosting account, again preserving your existing data/ and config/ files.

When an update is available for your Nextcloud server, you will see a notification at the top of your Nextcloud Web interface. When you click the notification it brings you here, to this page.

It is best to keep your Nextcloud server upgraded regularly, and to install all point releases and major releases. Major releases are 11, 12, and 13. Point releases are intermediate releases for each major release. For example, 13.0.4 and 12.0.9 are point releases. Skipping major releases is not supported.

Upgrading is disruptive. Your Nextcloud server will be put into maintenance mode, so your users will be locked out until the upgrade is completed. Large installations may take several hours to complete the upgrade. Nevertheless usual upgrade times even for bigger installations are in the range of a few minutes.

Warning

Downgrading is not supported and risks corrupting your data! If you want to revert to an older Nextcloud version, make a new, fresh installation and then restore your data from backup. Before doing this, file a support ticket (if you have paid support) or ask for help in the Nextcloud forums to see if your issue can be resolved without downgrading.

Update Notifications¶

Nextcloud has an update notification app, that informs the administrator about the availablilty of an update. Then you decide which update method to use.

Figure 1: The top banner is the update notification that is shown on every page, and the Updates section can be found in the admin page

From there the web based updater can be used to fetch this new code. There is also an CLI based updater available, that does exactly the same as the web based updater but on the command line.

Prerequisites¶

You should always maintain regular backups and make a fresh backup before every upgrade.

Then review third-party apps, if you have any, for compatibility with the new Nextcloud release. Any apps that are not developed by Nextcloud show a 3rd party designation. Install unsupported apps at your own risk. Then, before the upgrade, all 3rd party apps must be disabled. After the upgrade is complete you may re-enable them.

Maintenance mode¶

You can put your Nextcloud server into maintenance mode before performing upgrades, or for performing troubleshooting or maintenance. Please see Using the occ Command to learn how to put your server into the maintenance mode (maintenance:mode) or execute repair commands (maintenance:repair) with the occ command.

The build-in Updater does this for you before replacing the existing Nextcloud code with the code of the new Nextcloud version.

maintenance:mode locks the sessions of logged-in users and prevents new logins. This is the mode to use for upgrades. You must run occ as the HTTP user, like this example on Ubuntu Linux:

$ sudo -u www-data php occ maintenance:mode --on

You may also put your server into this mode by editing config/config.php. Change "maintenance" => false to "maintenance" => true:

<?php

 "maintenance" => true,

Then change it back to false when you are finished.