Upgrade manually

Always start by making a fresh backup and disabling all 3rd party apps.

  1. Back up your existing Nextcloud Server database, data directory, and config.php file. (See Backup, for restore information see Restoring backup)

  2. Download and unpack the latest Nextcloud Server release (Archive file) from nextcloud.com/install/ into an empty directory outside of your current installation.

    Note

    To unpack your new tarball, run: unzip nextcloud-[version].zip

  3. Stop your Web server.

  4. Rename your current Nextcloud directory, for example nextcloud-old.

  5. Unpacking the new archive creates a new nextcloud directory populated with your new server files. Copy this directory and its contents to the original location of your old server, for example /var/www/, so that once again you have /var/www/nextcloud.

  6. Copy the config.php file from your old Nextcloud directory to your new Nextcloud directory.

  7. If you keep your data/ directory in your nextcloud/ directory, copy it from your old version of Nextcloud to your new nextcloud/. If you keep it outside of nextcloud/ then you don’t have to do anything with it, because its location is configured in your original config.php, and none of the upgrade steps touch it.

  8. If you are using 3rd party applications, look in your new nextcloud/apps/ directory to see if they are there. If not, copy them from your old apps/ directory to your new one. Make sure the directory permissions of your third party application directories are the same as for the other ones.

  9. Adjust file ownership and permissions:

    chown -R www-data:www-data nextcloud
    find nextcloud/ -type d -exec chmod 750 {} \;
    find nextcloud/ -type f -exec chmod 640 {} \;
    
  10. Restart your Web server.

  11. Now launch the upgrade from the command line using occ, like this example on Ubuntu Linux:

    sudo -u www-data php occ upgrade
    
  12. The upgrade operation takes a few minutes to a few hours, depending on the size of your installation. When it is finished you will see a success message, or an error message that will tell where it went wrong.

Login and take a look at the bottom of your Admin page to verify the version number. Check your other settings to make sure they’re correct. Go to the Apps page and review the core apps to make sure the right ones are enabled. Re-enable your third-party apps.

Previous Nextcloud releases

You’ll find previous Nextcloud releases in the Nextcloud Server Changelog.

Troubleshooting

Occasionally, files do not show up after a upgrade. A rescan of the files can help:

sudo -u www-data php console.php files:scan --all

See the nextcloud.com support page for further resources.

Sometimes, Nextcloud can get stuck in a upgrade if the web based upgrade process is used. This is usually due to the process taking too long and encountering a PHP time-out. Stop the upgrade process this way:

sudo -u www-data php occ maintenance:mode --off

Then start the manual process:

sudo -u www-data php occ upgrade

If this does not work properly, try the repair function:

sudo -u www-data php occ maintenance:repair