Patching Nextcloud

Obtaining a patch

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 .diff to the URL: https://github.com/nextcloud/server/pull/26396.diff

  3. Download the patch to your server e.g. via wget https://github.com/nextcloud/server/pull/26396.diff (this will place 26396.diff in the local directory)

  4. Follow the Applying a patch steps.

  5. If you are on an older Nextcloud version, you might first need to go to the correct backported patch for your version.

backportbot-nextcloud linking to the pull request for an older version.

  1. You can find the appropriate version by looking for a link posted by backportbot-nextcloud to the backport pull request for your release, or by checking for a developer comment with a manual backport link. Use the .diff URL of that backport PR.

Applying a patch

Patching server

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

  2. Download the patch to your server e.g. via wget https://github.com/nextcloud/server/pull/26396.diff (this will place 26396.diff in the local directory)

  3. Apply the patch with the following command:

    patch -p 1 < ./26396.diff

  4. Alternatively, if the patch command is not available, use:

    git apply --check ./26396.diff
git apply ./26396.diff

Patching apps

  1. Navigate to the root of the app (usually apps/[APPID]/). If you cannot find the app there, use the sudo -E -u www-data php occ app:getpath APPID command to find the path.

  2. Download the patch to your server e.g. via wget https://github.com/nextcloud/<app>/pull/26396.diff (this will place 26396.diff in the local directory)

  3. 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. Revert the patch with the -R option:

    patch -R -p 1 < ./26396.diff

  3. Alternatively, if the patch command is not available, use:

    git apply --reverse ./26396.diff

Notes and troubleshooting

Note

You may see errors about files not being found, especially when applying patches from GitHub. Patches can include development or test files (for example, files under build/ or tests/) that are not present on your installation. These messages are expected and can be ignored if they refer only to such files.