I use Nextcloud, running on a little box in my closet, as an alternative to iCloud or Google Cloud. It’s amazing, really. I’m very grateful that this open source software is available to people who have the will and wherewithal to buck the big personal data miner mafia corps. When it became obvious what these worms intend to do with our data, I started looking for a way to keep my personal data personal.

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 #.