Intro
Debian does not support nextCloud out of the box. Therefore there is no way to migrate from ownCloud to nextCloud with Debian’s on board tools. But there is a user maintained repository providing debian backages for the latest version of nextCloud.
At the time of writing, the latest version of ownCloud is 10.0.10. For nextCloud version 15.0.2 is the latest. There is no direct way to get from ownCloud 10 to nextCloud 15. Instead we have to migrate from ownCloud 10 to nextCloud 12 first. After that we will go from nextCloud 12 to nextCloud 15 version by version. The last step is to replace the installation by the packages provided by the above mentioned user.
Backup
The first an most important step in the upgrade is to first create a backup of the database. This can be done with
$ read PWD ; mysqldump --user=root --password=$PWD --databases owncloud > /tmp/owncloud-20190212.sql ; unset PWD
In case we need to go back to the current ownCloud setup, the backup can be played back with
$ mysql -u root -p owncloud < /tmp/owncloud-20190212.sql
Migrate from ownCloud to nextCloud
Basically there are two ways to migrate from owncloud 10 to nextCloud 12.
Using the Migration tool
The first way to migrate is to use nextCloud’s migration tool. For this download the index.php to your server and save it into the folder updater in your ownCloud installation. Navigate to your onwCloud server and into the sub location
your.owncloudserver.com/updater/index.php
Now you should be able to start the upgrade process. But this way the server ist not working properly after the upgrade. Also since you need to replace one of the files on the server, the second migration method is the better way to do it.
Manual migration on the command line
The second way to do the migration is using the command line tools. First let’s prepare the upgrade process. We will need the following packages from the nextCloud download server:
Next we set the server into the maintenance mode:
sudo -u www-data php /var/www/owncloud/occ maintenance:mode --off
Now we can switch the site to the code of nextCloud 12. Let’s assume, the web server is reading the files from /var/www/owncloud.
cd /var/www mv owncloud owncloud.old tar tfj /path/to/nextcloud-12.0.12.tar.bz2 mv nextcloud nextcloud-12.0.12 ln -s nextcloud-12.0.12 owncloud
Change into the source folder:
cd /var/www/owncloud
The first step in the migration itself is to setup the page source. The files are unpacked with the wrong user and group, so let’s give them to the web user:
chown -R www-data:www-data .
Next we need to point the new installation to the old config files. Let’s again assume, the config files are hosted in /etc/owncloud. So we need to remove the old config and link to the existing config:
rm -r config ln -s /etc/owncloud config
Now we are ready to do the upgrade with:
sudo -u www-data php /var/www/owncloud/occ upgrade sudo -u www-data php /var/www/owncloud/occ maintenance:mode --off
Check Config
Before moving on, we need to check, if all apps and data are still there. And actually the upgrade has disabled the apps Calendar, Contacts and Tasks. They need to be reinstalled in the web interface. All the user data should still be there, even the contacts, calendar entries and tasks.
Upgrade to version 14
Basically the upgrade from nextCloud 12 to 14 involves the same steps as for the migration. So basically we do:
cd /var/www tar xfj /path/to/nextcloud-<version>.tar.bz2 mv nextcloud nextcloud-<version> rm owncloud ln -s nextcloud-<version> owncloud cd owncloud chown -R www-data:www-data . rm -r config ln -s /etc/owncloud sudo -u www-data php /var/www/owncloud/occ upgrade
After every step we need to check, if all apps and data are still there. And again, Calendar, Contacts and Tasks need to be resintalled again after the upgrade to nextCloud 14.
Final Step — Upgrade to 15
The final upgrade to version 15 is not done manually, but by pulling in the Jurisic Debian Repository.
We start by adding the source to apt:
echo "deb http://apt.jurisic.org/debian/ stretch main contrib non-free" >> /etc/apt/sources.list.d/nextcloud.list wget -q http://apt.jurisic.org/Release.key -O- | apt-key add -
Now we can install nextCloud 15 using the apt-tool chain:
apt-get install nextcloud
This will install nextCloud in /var/www/nextcloud. Now we can go to the known procedure for a last time:
cd /var/www rm owncloud ln -s nextcloud owncloud cd owncloud rm -r config ln -s /etc/owncloud sudo -u www-data php /var/www/owncloud/occ upgrade
For a last time we need to check, if all the data and apps are there, and if so, the migration is finished.