Add guidance about optional services in migration guide

[skjnldsv]

Summary

Adds explicit guidance about optional services in the migration guide to prevent migration failures.

Problem

When migrating Nextcloud to a new server, users often encounter errors like "Redis server went away" because they fail to configure optional services (Redis, Memcached, etc.) on the new machine before completing the migration. The current migration guide makes no mention of these dependencies.

Solution

Added an "important" notice in Step 1 of the migration guide that instructs users to:

1. Check the original system's config/config.php for optional services
2. Identify commonly configured services (Redis, Memcached, external storage, etc.)
3. Install and configure these same services on the new machine BEFORE copying Nextcloud files

Changes

• Updated admin_manual/maintenance/migrating.rst
• Added explicit list of services to check for (Redis, Memcached, external storage, LDAP, mail, search backends)
• Emphasized the critical timing: services must be configured before startup

Relates to

#14036

[miaulalala]

🍓 nice

[github-actions]

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• admin_manual/maintenance/migrating.rst

Last updated: Thu, 07 May 2026 09:24:59 GMT

[sproggit]

as the author of the Enhancement Suggestion that prompted the creation of this Issue, I think this captures the challenge well. I'm not sure if it helps to clarify further, but in the hope that it does... I think there are a couple of elements here, only one of which can be addressed by NextCloud...

The method I chose to take to port a running instance to a new server was to create a new server environment and then perform a vanilla installation of NextCloud on the target host, using a new domain name and IP address. I then used that vanilla environment to debug dependencies and oddities before following the guide in terms of porting the site content to the new host. What I found was that the "vanilla site" worked just fine, but the the ported version didn't.

I appreciate this might be difficult to do at the NextCloud platform level [because some dependencies might be introduced by optional Apps] but is there any way that NextCloud is or can be made aware of those dependencies, such that an administrator could migrate a "dependency list" out of their existing environment and use that to sanity check the destination?

[skjnldsv]

@sproggit thanks for the input :)
So, your suggestion of having those listed at the NC level is great. But we don't really have a migration settings page on nc. We do have the user migration app, but this is really more about user data than it is about infrastructure.

I think having it in the docs should be good enough 👍