Upgrade automation and management

[sushidave]

Automate Nextcloud and app upgrades, similar to WordPress, offering options for:

Auto-Upgrade:

• enable/disable

Release type selector:

• minor/major releases
• apps

Email notification:

• enable/disable
• for available new releases
• after upgrades have been installed
• for failed upgrades fails, stating the reason
• recipient: admin email address (default) or custom email addresses

Backup management:

• max. number of backups to be kept (= auto-delete older backups) *)
• deletion of individual backups *)

*) See these forum posts:

• https://help.nextcloud.com/t/manage-backups-from-the-updater-app/7672
• https://help.nextcloud.com/t/updater-delete-old-backups/7617
• https://help.nextcloud.com/t/remove-backups-after-upgrade/27204

[MorrisJobke]

Backup management:

max. number of backups to be kept (= auto-delete older backups) *)
deletion of individual backups *)

Those are already done in Nextcloud 14: nextcloud/server#9855

Not configurable, but I also don't see a need to make this configurable.

[MorrisJobke]

Regarding the automatic run:

The plan for this was always to run it in an automated fashion. It was not yet heavily tested, because some crucial thinks aren't fully tested yet (like rollbacks in all possible situations - they only work for some early steps but the latter steps could run into issues where it is not fully rolled back).

But you can test this by running the updater.phar in the non-interactive mode, by doing this:

$ php -u www-data php updater.phar -n

This will always run the update of the code followed by an occ upgrade and leaving the maintenance mode again.

We just run somehow in a corner case where the upgrade is somehow not fully completed and occ upgrade still needs to run, which is kind of bad and we are debugging it right now. See nextcloud/server#10362 for more details.

The idea is then to put the above command in the crontab and run it every night to be up to date. The further vision is to be able to pin the version to a given constraint to have a bit more control over the automatic upgrades, which is right now controlled over the channels.

[MorrisJobke]

for available new releases

Already the case in the server itself (see the update notification that is enabled by default) - it has an option to notify people.

apps updates

Those are fully handled inside the server and we also not plan to add them to the updater, because it should solve one issue very reliable: "update the server" nothing more and nothing less.

enable/disable

Which is basically an "enable crontab entry or not".

[sushidave]

@MorrisJobke Thank you very much for your status update and helpful information.

[fuco809]

release channels behaviour feature request:

would be nice if also a channel for "patches only" were available for updates.
https://nextcloud.com/release-channels/

sometimes i just want to rollout available patches and not switch for example from 14.0.4 directly to v15.
cause: i had more to test after a bigger release upgrade than just a patch.

[MorrisJobke]

sometimes i just want to rollout available patches and not switch for example from 14.0.4 directly to v15.
cause: i had more to test after a bigger release upgrade than just a patch.

We fixed that 2 weeks ago. For details see my description of the new behavior in nextcloud/server#8799 (comment) (also the text in the update notification and channel selector was updated with this)

[MorrisJobke]

This seems to be working with the -n option and can be closed.