Nextcloud available in portage, migration thoughts

I think there has been more than enough news on nextcloud origins, the fork from owncloud, … so I will keep this post to the technical bits.

Installing nextcloud on Gentoo

For now, the differences between owncloud 9 and nextcloud 9 are mostly cosmetic, so a few quick edits to owncloud ebuild ended in a working nextcloud one. And thanks to the different package names, you can install both in parallel (as long as they do not use the same database, of course).

So if you want to test nextcloud, it’s just a command away:

# emerge -a nextcloud

With the default webapp parameters, it will install alongside owncloud.

Migrating owncloud data

Nothing official again here, but as I run a small instance (not that much data) with simple sqlite backend, I could copy the data and configuration to nextcloud and test it while keeping owncloud.
Adapt the paths and web user to your setup: I have these webapps in the default /var/www/localhost/htdocs/ path, with www-server as the web server user.

First, clean the test data and configuration (if you logged in nextcloud):

# rm /var/www/localhost/htdocs/nextcloud/config/config.php
# rm -r /var/www/localhost/htdocs/nextcloud/data/*

Then clone owncloud’s data and config. If you feel adventurous (or short on available disk space), you can move these files instead of copying them:

# cp -a /var/www/localhost/htdocs/owncloud/data/* /var/www/localhost/htdocs/nextcloud/data/
# cp -a /var/www/localhost/htdocs/owncloud/config/config.php /var/www/localhost/htdocs/nextcloud/config/

Change all owncloud occurences in config.php to nextcloud (there should be only one, for ‘datadirectory’. And then run the (nextcloud) updater. You can do it via the web interface, or (safer) with the CLI occ tool:

# sudo -u www-server php /var/www/localhost/htdocs/nextcloud/occ upgrade

As with “standard” owncloud upgrades, you will have to reactivate additional plugins after logging in. Also check the nextcloud log for potential warnings and errors.

In my test, the only non-official plugin that I use, files_reader (for ebooks)  installed fine in nextcloud, and the rest worked as fine as owncloud with a lighter default theme 🙂
For now, owncloud-client works if you point it to the new /nextcloud URL on your server, but this can (and probably will) change in the future.

More migration tips and news can be found in this nextcloud forum post, including some nice detailed backup steps for mysql-backed systems migration.