Manual Nextcloud Upgrade¶

Always start by making a fresh backup and disabling all 3rd party apps.

Put your server in maintenance mode. This prevents new logins, locks the sessions of logged-in users, and displays a status screen so users know what is happening. There are two ways to do this, and the preferred method is to use the occ command, which you must run as your HTTP user. This example is for Ubuntu Linux:

sudo -u www-data php occ maintenance:mode --on

The other way is by entering your config.php file and changing 'maintenance' => false, to 'maintenance' => true,.

Back up your existing Nextcloud Server database, data directory, and config.php file. (See Backing up Nextcloud.)
Download and unpack the latest Nextcloud Server release (Archive file) from nextcloud.com/install/ into an empty directory outside of your current installation.

Note

To unpack your new tarball, run: tar xjf nextcloud-[version].tar.bz2
Stop your Web server.
Rename your current Nextcloud directory, for example nextcloud-old.
Unpacking the new archive creates a new nextcloud directory populated with your new server files. Copy this directory and its contents to the original location of your old server, for example /var/www/, so that once again you have /var/www/nextcloud.
Copy the config.php file from your old Nextcloud directory to your new Nextcloud directory.
If you keep your data/ directory in your nextcloud/ directory, copy it from your old version of Nextcloud to your new nextcloud/. If you keep it outside of nextcloud/ then you don’t have to do anything with it, because its location is configured in your original config.php, and none of the upgrade steps touch it.
If you are using 3rd party applications, look in your new nextcloud/apps/ directory to see if they are there. If not, copy them from your old apps/ directory to your new one. Make sure the directory permissions of your third party application directories are the same as for the other ones.
Restart your Web server.
Now launch the upgrade from the command line using occ, like this example on CentOS Linux:
```
sudo -u apache php occ upgrade
```
The upgrade operation takes a few minutes to a few hours, depending on the size of your installation. When it is finished you will see a success message, or an error message that will tell where it went wrong.

Assuming your upgrade succeeded, disable the maintenance mode:

sudo -u www-data php occ maintenance:mode --off

Login and take a look at the bottom of your Admin page to verify the version number. Check your other settings to make sure they’re correct. Go to the Apps page and review the core apps to make sure the right ones are enabled. Re-enable your third-party apps. Then apply strong permissions to your Nextcloud directories (Setting Strong Directory Permissions).

Previous Nextcloud Releases¶

You’ll find previous Nextcloud releases in the Nextcloud Server Changelog.

Reverse Upgrade¶

If you need to reverse your upgrade, see Restoring Nextcloud.

Troubleshooting¶

When upgrading Nextcloud and you are running MySQL or MariaDB with binary logging enabled, your upgrade may fail with these errors in your MySQL/MariaDB log:

An unhandled exception has been thrown:
exception 'PDOException' with message 'SQLSTATE[HY000]: General error: 1665
Cannot execute statement: impossible to write to binary log since
BINLOG_FORMAT = STATEMENT and at least one table uses a storage engine limited
to row-based logging. InnoDB is limited to row-logging when transaction
isolation level is READ COMMITTED or READ UNCOMMITTED.'

Please refer to MySQL / MariaDB with Binary Logging Enabled on how to correctly configure your environment.

Occasionally, files do not show up after a upgrade. A rescan of the files can help:

sudo -u www-data php console.php files:scan --all

See the nextcloud.com support page for further resources.

Sometimes, Nextcloud can get stuck in a upgrade. This is usually due to the process taking too long and encountering a PHP time-out. Stop the upgrade process this way:

sudo -u www-data php occ maintenance:mode --off

Then start the manual process:

sudo -u www-data php occ upgrade

If this does not work properly, try the repair function:

sudo -u www-data php occ maintenance:repair