Nextcloud, a truly wonderful open source project, allows you to create your own co-lab hub. You can choose to host it yourself, or get a Nextcloud instance at one of the many service providers, such as WebbPlatsen i Sverige AB. Nextcloud can replace many not-so-GDPR-safe alternatives and other costly solutions. If you, by some small miracly, still do not know what Nextcloud is, go check it out at nextcloud.com.
For the past few years, Nextcloud has kept an almost alarmingly fast pace when it comes to updates. Quite often, a major version is followed by a few minor updates, and then another major version is released. Typically, a lot of new functionality has been thrown in for the major updates. Naturally, we want more functionality and toys 🙂
Updating Nextcloud is usually not a big issue, unless the Nextcloud downloads are slow. And they are, quite frequently, very slow. So slow in fact that the Nextcloud updater exits with an error when it comes to the step where it downloads the new files, even if you increase your PHP maximum execution time to 10 minutes (!)
There are ways to improve your Nextcloud upgrade experience, some of them are mentioned here. The remainder of this post assumes you have some sort of file access to your Nextcloud server.
Nextcloud updater times out when downloading
If you go to the data directory for Nextcloud during an update, there’s typically a directory called updater-nnn, where nnn is an arbitrary string. This is where Nextcloud keeps its files for the upgrader, including progression counters and downloads.
From the Nextcloud web interface, under Administration.Overview, there’s a Download now button that is actually just a link. You can copy the link and download the file manually. Once the download has completed, you can place it in the downloads sub-directory of the updater-nnn directory. Once done, re-start the upgrade process.
Nextcloud updater gets stuck during the update process
In the same updater-nnn directory, there is a “step counter” so that Nextcloud can keep track of where in the update process it is currently positioned. If Nextcloud keeps getting stuck at the download step, or you are presented with “Step 4 is currently in process. Please reload this page later.”, you may try to remove the file .step and re-start the upgrade process.
Manually upgrading Nextcloud from CLI
If you have shell access to your Nextcloud instance, you may also attempt a manual upgrade, which may have different timeout settings (or no timeout settings). The short version is listed below, the long version can be found in the official Nextcloud documentation, please make sure you read it before attempting a manual upgrade!
sudo -u www-data php /var/www/nextcloud/occ upgrade sudo -u www-data php /var/www/nextcloud/occ maintenance:mode --off
Replace www-data for the user PHP and/or your web server is running as and correct paths as needed.