Nextcloud 14.0.3 update

07Sep 2019 by Jim Blaich

Nextcloud though a good concept has issues that always seem to crop up during the update process.  Now there are quite a few things that are problems here.

  1. Stuck on an old version and it won’t let you update via the interface
  2. running the occ command to update says you are up to date
  3. if you run the ../updater/pharupdater it fails saying that it can’t delete old resources — like that matters one freaking bit as far as completing the update goes.  Tell me where they are and I’ll delete them afterwards.
  4. insufficient feedback during the update and error messages are unclear and seemingly meant only for the developers.
  5. expecting that their lack of documentation on updater errors is ok and that you should pay them.  That’s just bad business.

I ran the gambit this afternoon when updating from version 14 to 15, which then has to be updated to 16.  Well.

 

[ ] Delete old files …PHP Warning: rmdir(/var/www/html/cloud.readright.com/updater/../resources): Permission denied in phar:///var/www/html/cloud.domain.com/updater/updater.phar/lib/Updater.php on line 843
[✘] Delete old files failed
Could not rmdir: /var/www/html/cloud.domain.com/updater/../resources

Update failed. To resume or retry just execute the updater again.

I received that message when attempting the manual update “sudo -u www-data php updater.phar”

The cause was unclear.  Could not write.  Well, it could and the folder had the correct permissions. 

The answer was that the top level folder for the nextcloud had the wrong permissions but everything inside it had the correct permissions.

After setting the correct permissions on the /var/www/html/nextcloud folder then the update completed correctly.

So, after this I tried to update to 16.x from 15.x and received the following (yet again more stupid issues with nextcloud updates):

Nextcloud Updater – version: v15.0.7-4-ged74b90

Current version is 15.0.11.

Update to Nextcloud 16.0.4 available. (channel: “stable”)
Following file will be downloaded automatically: https://nextcloud.com/outdated-php-7-0/
The updater is disabled for this update – please update manually.

Nothing to do.

I’m guessing that this means that I have version 7.0 of php and hence if I don’t updated to 7.1 or 7.2 or 7.3 then I can’t update.  However if I do I could end up messing with PHP for other services.

If this were running in a container then maybe I could freely do this, but I’m not about to install docker for any reason.  My plans are to install proxmox which uses lxc which happens to be a better technology due to it allowing each container to have its own ports.

Now I don’t know if this will resolve it.  That’s just a guess.  And which ever one it needs is well, another long drawn out series of issues that need to be resolved just to get something (that should be simple) updated.