Rant: Nextcloud Client Push on ARM64 — or how I spent an evening not pulling a Docker image

🏷️ General
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I have no support/technical question and have seen the support category. (Be aware that direct support questions will be deleted.)

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Which general topic do you have

ARM64 turned out to be a second class citizen - again. notify_push isn’t really a straightforward addition to a docker stack on ARM64. Here’s a little rant which also provides a solution…:

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and what is an added value you are trying to share with the community?

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I’m not sure off-hand why DockerHub only has the x64 image, but the build workflow builds both amd64 and arm64 and puts the real images on ghcr.io, not DockerHub. Package notify_push · GitHub

Both are available there.

That’s the coded build workflow; DockerHub isn’t in it so my wild guess is that the image that ends up there is manually uploaded (which likely explains the weirdness).

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Fine, I thought — there’s a fallback. The app has an installer command, occ notify_push:install, which downloads the right binary for your platform into the container. That’s the official path for containers. That must work.

That’s the second lie. It’s a known bug — nextcloud/notify_push#720 — where on ARM the downloaded binary comes out in the wrong format or, my personal favorite, 0 bytes. The “solution” in the issue is to delete the app and reinstall it, which makes the downloader try again, and it just as happily downloads garbage again. The downloader apparently has no idea what architecture it’s running on. It’s 2026. uname -m exists. I checked.

I assume you meant occ app:install notify_push. There is only one version of the app package; it includes all supported binaries (there in a bin/ folder within the app’s installation folder). There is no download by architecture or anything like that (unlike the image).

When you run occ notify_push:setup it detects the architecture and test the corresponding binary. I see you linked to the standalone bug report, but I’m unclear what you experienced when you tried that approach. Did you experience the same thing?

P.S. The reporter in that linked report is using AIO, which has its own approach to selecting the CPU architecture and running the corresponding notify_push binary from the app package. It’s not clear why that particular reporter is experiencing that.