I think that this may be useful for potential upgraders and venture enthusiasts of all sorts.
This is not a technical post.
I run an arch-linux server with nginx+mariadb+php-fpm+redis installation, Nextcloud 17.03 instance. Note that php version is 7.3 refusing to upgrade because it breaks nextcloud.
This is a small production server with a handful of users. Nothing fancy.
It took a few weeks to stabilize an acceptable performance with Nextcloud 17.0.1 then onwards to the next release etc. It was mostly work performed by examining error logs, a lot of reading in this and other forums and experience (whatever that is worth).
It was impossible -for me- to set up collabora or onlyoffice on the same server running the Nextcloud instance, so everyone was advised to continue clouding their documents in the likes of google and or onedrive.
After the arrival of Nextcloud Hub aka 18 and subsequently 18.01 version, I decided to give it a go.
Obviously backups and disk cloning were taken care before jumping on the train.
Manual install was the way to go (so that I knew exactly what was going on) by following mostly this manual upgrade
No hick-ups, transition was smooth. Minor alerts in Nextcloud logs were easy to address (the likes of missing indices).
I started testing the server and was pleasantly surprised by its speed and other minor things like immediately logging out from the web interface (it took ages with v. 17).
Then I said to myself, what the hell let’s go for onlyoffice and community-documentserver. The latter simply refuses to download. Once again it was time to go manually and download separately, extract to the directory of /nextcloud/apps and enable from within the web interface. That took no less than 3 hours because the nextcloud server was crawling to a state of early internet days. An amazing 50-60 kb/s
The only issue was fixing the ownership of http in /nextcloud. Piece of cake.
Tested it and it works nicely. But the iOS app doesn’t. Message is ONLYOFFICE cannot be reached. It points me to the admin who happens to be me. Despite all efforts, I could not solve the problem. Case study for the iOS dev I guess.
Disk cloning and time for the little masochist in me. Party time with php-7.4
Surprisingly, everything went smoothly. Until I realized that nextcloud logs were flooded with nonsense of compiler errors. My php logs were clear. Bump. I give up.
I am not sure if I will point the production server to 18.01 with php-7.3 or rollback to 17.03 backup image.
The benefits of the document server and sharing are important for the users but…
Happy upgrading folks.