I’ve been running Nextcloud version 22 for the last couple years. As you can see from https://nextcloud.com/changelog/ , there have been many updates and upgrades since my original installation and I’ve been quite negligent with my sys admin duties. Today, I’m trying to remedy that situation.

I have Nextcloud running in docker. I use docker-compose to set up the environment, so I need to also upgrade through each version of Nextcloud using docker-compose, one major version at a time.

I use this app DAILY so, I don’t want any surprises, which often happen during upgrades. So first, I’ll replicate all the data from my server to my PC. This way I have a sandbox where I can make all my changes while my production environment remains untouched. If something goes wrong.. No problemo.

The PC is a Windows machine, so I’ll spin up an Ubuntu image to do all the transfers.

docker run -it -v "$(pwd):/volume" ubuntu /bin/bash

Next I’ll get the image equipped with the tools that I need to rysnc my way to a mirrored environment.

cd /volume && \ 
apt update  && \
apt install ssh rsync && \
rsync -rav --stats --progress admin@sourceIP:/path/to/nextcloud /volume -e "ssh -o StrictHostKeyChecking=no"

Good, the transfer is ~80Gigs in my case, so that took a min.

This is my existing docker-compose.yml You’ll also notice that I’ve specified mariadb:10.7 as that is what is currently running in the production env. I’ll upgrade that as needed.

version: '3'
services:
  nextcloud:
    container_name: nextcloud
    image: "nextcloud:22"
    ports:
      - 8000:80
    restart: always
    volumes:
      - ./html:/var/www/html
      - ./logs:/var/log/apache2
    env_file:
      - ./db.env
    networks:
      - proxy
      - internal_network

  mariadb:
    container_name: mariadb
    image: "mariadb:10.7"
    command: "--transaction-isolation=READ-COMMITTED --binlog-format=ROW --innodb-file-per-table=1 --skip-innodb-read-only-compressed"
    restart: always
    volumes:
      - ./db:/var/lib/mysql
    env_file:
      - ./db.env
    networks:
      - internal_network

  phpmyadmin:
    container_name: phpmyadmin
    image: phpmyadmin/phpmyadmin
    links:
    - mariadb:mysql
    ports:
      - 8001:80
    env_file:
      - ./db.env
    environment:
      PMA_HOST: mariadb
      UPLOAD_LIMIT: 300M
    networks:
      - proxy
      - internal_network

networks:
  internal_network:
    internal: true
  proxy:  
    external: true

Now that I have a sandbox to start running these upgrades, let’s just run everything once through to make sure the app is running “as-is”.

docker-compose up -d

The logs reported a minor upgrade, but other than that, we’re up and running.

Let’s upgrade to the next major version now. To do that, I just increment the number in docker-compose.yml from image: "nextcloud:22" to image: "nextcloud:23" then run:

docker-compose down
docker-compose up --force-recreate --build -d

Then I’ll watch my logs docker logs nextcloud to see when everything is done upgrading. You should see something like

docker logs --tail 1000 -f daecd812fefe464712b9b6717cb6e2a3d842260e0c64c63ec88ea22e2edb9623 

Initializing nextcloud 25.0.3.2 ...
Upgrading nextcloud from 24.0.9.2 ...

… but with the versions you’re currently updating. The update between 22 and 23 just worked.

Be sure to update all the apps to the new version in between each upgrade with php ./occ app:update --all or through the web UI.

It was between 23 and 24 where I needed to upgrade mariadb as well. In this case, I’m now using mariadb:latest. Then attach a shell into that container and run mysql_upgrade --user=root --password=rootpassword

If you catch a snag at any point, your best bet is to attach a shell into the nextcloud container and run php ./occ upgrade. If you are dealing with file permission issues, try attaching to the shell as the owner with: docker exec -it -u 33 nextcloud bash where 33 is the user #.

I’m continually impressed by ChatGPT. This morning I thought it would be really nice to be able to track my health statistics on Nextcloud, my private cloud that I have running just behind me in my closet. What a cool little project to give to ChatGPT and see how quickly we can get something up and running. It’s 8am on a Tuesday morning, I’m back to work on my day job, but I have about an hour to fiddle around with it. Let’s see how quickly ChatGPT can get this started….

A little background, I’ve been tracking some health parameters for a while with iHealth, mainly because they’ve made it easy to do so. I have a bluetooth bloodpressure cuff, every time I take my BP, it’s logged to the cloud. It has a nice UI. But, I’m not very happy with giving my health information away anymore. So I’ve been looking for a new home for my health data. Lately, I’ve been using “Waistline”, an open source app found on F-Droid. It works, but not nearly as nicely as iHealth. The data is siloed, and I’m not really sure how to get it out of the app. So, passively I’m still looking. That’s were we pick up the story for this idea.

Here is the chat in it’s entirety. I basically walk the bot through the process of coding the entire plugin for me.

At this point, I have yet to test it out, but as you can see, it’s an amazing start. I’ve got a plugin templated out, an API, and directions to get the frontend started as well. It’s 9am now, so I need to get to my day job. But, wow. Just WOW.

More to come as time permits.