Nextcloud 15 Beta 1 is out, time to start testing!

Originally published at: https://nextcloud.com/blog/nextcloud-15-beta-1-is-out-time-to-start-testing/

We hit feature freeze this week and today we’ve put the first beta of Nextcloud 15 on our download servers, ready for your testing! As always, we want to make sure that upgrades are smooth as well as, of course, day to day usage. There is still a fair bit of polishing to do as well so we’re looking for all feedback we can get.

Nextcloud 15 beta 1 (zip)

Feature freeze?

Winter is coming! In all seriousness, 'feature freeze' means that we will no longer add new features, just improve and stabilize the release further. This is the stage in our development at which we release our first beta and begin to focus on polishing and bug fixing. The perfect time to get involved and help us make this release awesome!

What's new

Too much to mention! This is a major release so it comes with loads of goodies. But it is still early beta, so let's focus first on polishing it up before we talk about what's new. We have our automated tests and it has gotten some basic smoke testing but no test scheme can replace the myriad of ways you all use Nextcloud, on NAS devices to big iron servers!

Besides testing, your help is also welcome in polishing. Small UI improvements, fixes to details - and of course bugfixes! If you are new to Nextcloud, you’re more than welcome to get involved - simply join us on github or check out this page on our website. Note that translations are very welcome too! Now is the time to translate and make sure 15 is ready for as big a number of users as possible. We have millions of users and they don’t all read English!

If you are on the beta channel, we will make beta 15 available soon, stay tuned!

1 Like

This makes no sense. The new code is what needs testing the most. Why waste testers time trying to discover where it is?

3 Likes

New to 15 is as follows …

Would be nice

What’s new… too much to mention? Name just a few then!..

2 Likes

Yes please

1 Like

Things like ‘changed the font’ and ‘new view’ and ‘new sharing sidebar’ are all things you’ll test by any kind of basic usage, but yeah, I’ll try and make a list of things-to-test for the next beta announcement, promise.

It was mostly a matter of “too little time, too much to do” :wink:
But the biggest changes are in UI refinements and sharing improvements. Much of the rest is very low level (hard to test specifically, other than just by using the app), or in apps. We talk about that later, not to give all the spoilers away :wink:

4 Likes

When will it be available in the Nextcloud Beta Updater. Then I do the update.

If you just want to do a quick test.
Try this in an EC2, Digital Ocean droplet, scaleway server or in your virtualbox.
But not in production!

curl -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ReinerNippes/nextcloud/master/prepare_system.sh | /bin/bash
ansible-pull --clean --force -d ~/nextcloud15.beta1 -i 'nextcloud' -U https://github.com/ReinerNippes/nextcloud.git nextcloud.yml \
-e "next_archive=https://download.nextcloud.com/server/prereleases/nextcloud-15.0.0beta2.zip" \
-e "fqdn=ffd3e64f-34c9-4041-8cee-dcfe33908cdd.pub.cloud.scaleway.com" \
-e "ssl_certificate_type=selfsigned" \
-e "talk_install=false" \
-e "install_onlyoffice=false" \
-e "install_collabora=false" \
-e "dhparam_numbits=1024"

Or with Collabora Office and Letsencrypt certificates.

curl -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ReinerNippes/nextcloud/master/prepare_system.sh | /bin/bash
ansible-pull --clean --force -d ~/nextcloud15.beta1 -i 'nextcloud' -U https://github.com/ReinerNippes/nextcloud.git nextcloud.yml \
-e "next_archive=https://download.nextcloud.com/server/prereleases/nextcloud-15.0.0beta2.zip" \
-e "fqdn=ffd3e64f-34c9-4041-8cee-dcfe33908cdd.pub.cloud.scaleway.com" \
-e "ssl_certificate_type=letsencrypt" \
-e "cert_email=nc@example.com" \
-e "talk_install=false" \
-e "install_onlyoffice=false" \
-e "install_collabora=true" \
-e "dhparam_numbits=1024"

systemctl restart docker

Login with admin / tOpSecrET2018

Change the fqdn= and cert_mail= lines.
Talk and Onlyoffice didn’t install. I think they not yet compatible with NC15.

Hilarious! You want people to test without telling what’s new? So what are we supposed to beta test ?

They will tell us more details later,
Nextcloud looks like underwater, they don’t have time to do a changelog, to write documentation … they have a lot to do, they need more help. Guys for translating, writing docs and etc…

You just have to update a test server and tell if you see some bugs in :
Web UI
Regressions
Deadlocks

This version 15 won’t have a lot of great improvement like new features. But it normally be an undercover update for performances.

1 Like

https://github.com/nextcloud/server/compare/v15.0.0beta1…v14.0.3
Maybe this helps.

3 Likes

Your own standard use case tests can be run at any moment, to see if there are no regressions.
Stability and reliability are Nextcloud attributes many people like.
When major changes are announced we can test them as well, and maybe add them into the standard use case tests.

Did e2e in v13 ever get finished?

1 Like

Installed the 15 beta on my testsite from the zip file, because web updater does still not show up with the version (beta channel is activated). No issues so far, seems to be quite fast. The file app seems to have a new default view with very large icons, but I could reset it to the old grid view.

Errors in the beta phase are expected and can be directly submitted to the bug tracker: https://github.com/nextcloud/server/issues

Who thinks about updating, note that the compatible app update check does not yet work, it will tell you that all apps have updates for NC15 available: https://github.com/nextcloud/server/issues/12477

1 Like

Thanks everybody for testing, the final version is out now:

1 Like