Documentation Enhancement Suggestions

[sproggit]

Before You Submit

• I have checked for existing issues and pull requests related to my suggestion.
• I have posted on the Nextcloud Community Help Forum if my suggestion is a troubleshooting scenario or I'm unsure about the solution.

Type of Suggestion

Suggesting an improvement

Relevant Documentation Links

https://docs.nextcloud.com/server/stable/admin_manual/installation/php_configuration.html

Summary

Minor Suggestins for PHP and Redis in the Documentation

Details

I've just completed a migration of my local instance of 32.0.5 and hit a couple of issues - and wanted to share suggested enhancements for the documentation. For context, I've been performing the "bare metal" installation on a native Raspberry Pi running the latest Trixie OS version.

1. Outdated List of Required PHP Modules [and other dependencies].
   The list at the above URL is now increasingly out of date as more of the optional modules seem to be bundled by default with the core PHP package set. I've just deployed on PHP 8.4 and several of the identified modules cannot be found because they seem to be bundled [I'm using Debian packages via Raspberry Pi OS].

Similarly, when I ran "apachectl -M" on both my "old" and "new" hosts, I quickly spotted that the "new" host did not have "proxy_module (shared)" and "proxy_fcgi_module (shared)". I've raised this as a question with the Raspberry Pi folks, but anyone else performing a similar migration on the Pi platform will hit the same issue. It makes sense to capture the right response to stuff like this - or at least make clear if a gap is critical or not. My sense is that the community would gladly share given the means to do so.

2. Major Issue - Redis
   Before I attempted to port my existing NC instance from my Bookworm host to my Trixie host, I performed a clean installation using the web installer - and that seemed to work perfectly. I then went ahead and followed your migration guide, which failed after successfully starting Apache and getting a login prompt. In the log file there were a bunch of messages to the effect that "Redis server went away". First - these error messages are largely useless - apart from giving me the clue that I might have a "redis" issue. Second - when I checked, I discovered that redis was not enabled by default on my Trixie server. After enabling it, I was able to get my ported NC instance working perfectly... but I wanted to call this out because the "clean" installation did work perfectly from the get-go, with no Redis related errors. My best guess is that your installation/setup does some kind of "functionality inventory" during installation and configures the running environment to take the best setup given the local platform. However there is nothing in the documentation, anywhere, that mentions this. There are NO references to redis as a dependency in the migration guide - and there should be.

3. Security & setup warnings
   Once up and running, a check in the "Administration" Screens for warnings often shows a variety of different errors... but much of the linked documentation is next to useless. For example, one of the error messages refers to the lack of SVG functionality within the ImageMagick libraries. Obviously every platform on which NC runs has the potential for a different solution for this specific problem... but trying to track this down for my RPi setup was an exercise in frustration until I came across a reddit thread and a suggestion to try, "sudo apt-get install php-imagick imagemagick" - which did the trick. Maybe there is an opportunity for you to amend the links so that the "warning" message takes you to a page with a further breakdown by platform [major distro] and then you could invite the community to crowdsource solutions to these messages. What you have at the moment is not really helpful - and I understand that you won't have the bandwidth or resources to address every permutation, but surely there is a solution here where you can facilitate a mechanism for people who do find working solutions to make it possible for them to share what they know?

Additional Notes

No response