Wow, its quite shocking to see the developers’ attitudes towards logging the lack of understanding and support given to those that need to interpret these logs.
For those that need help, here’s what I’ve found.
There is a useful log in (debian location) /var/www/html/data/nextcloud.log or /var/html/data/nextcloud/data/nextcloud.log
To make things more fun, the devs didn’t simply save logs. No no, they store the logs in JSON format. So you’ll get a really hard to read format of text returned if you tail the log file.
I get why they chose to do this. But pointing someone to a web based log reader, when the web interface is down, is just counter productive.
After some googling, I found that one can post process the file after tailing it. This makes it human readable.
tail -f /var/www/html/data/nextcloud.log | jq
If you get an error about jq being missing, just install it from the apt repo with sudo apt install jq