Manual ownCloud Upgrade

Warning

When upgrading from oC 9.0 to 9.1 with existing Calendars or Addressbooks, please have a look at the Release Notes of ownCloud 9.0 for important info about the needed migration steps during that upgrade.

Backup Your Existing Installation

First, backup the following items:

  • The ownCloud server data directory
  • The config.php file
  • All 3rd party apps
  • The ownCloud server database
# This example assumes Ubuntu Linux and MariaDB

cp -rv /var/www/owncloud /opt/backup/owncloud
mysqldump <db_name> > /opt/backup/backup-file.sql

Check ownCloud’s Mandatory Requirements

ownCloud’s mandatory requirements (such as PHP versions and extensions) can change from one version to the next. Ensure that you review them and update your server(s), if required, before upgrading ownCloud.

Enable Maintenance Mode

Then, put your server in maintenance mode, and disable Cron jobs. Doing so prevents new logins, locks the sessions of logged-in users, and displays a status screen so that users know what is happening.

There are two ways to enable maintenance mode. The preferred method is to use the occ command — which you must run as your webserver user. The other way is by entering your config.php file and changing 'maintenance' => false, to 'maintenance' => true,.

# Enable maintenance mode using the occ command.
sudo -u www-data php occ maintenance:mode --on

# Disable Cron jobs
sudo service cron stop

Irrespective of the approach that you take, with those steps completed, next stop your webserver.

sudo service apache2 stop

Download the Latest Installation

Download the latest ownCloud server release from owncloud.org/install/ into an empty directory outside of your current installation.

Note

Enterprise users must download their new ownCloud archives from their accounts on https://customer.owncloud.com/owncloud/.

Setup the New Installation

Not all installations are the same, so we encourage you to take one of two paths to upgrade your ownCloud installation. These are the standard upgrade and the power user upgrade.

If you’re reasonably new to ownCloud, or not too familiar with upgrading an ownCloud installation, please follow the standard upgrade. Otherwise, take the approach that you’re most comfortable with, likely the power user upgrade.

Note

Regardless of which approach that you take, they will both assume that your existing ownCloud installation is located in the default location: /var/www/owncloud.

The Standard Upgrade

Delete all files and folders in your existing ownCloud directory (/var/www/owncloud) — except data and config.

Attention

Don’t keep the apps directory.

With those files and folders deleted, extract the archive of the latest ownCloud server, over the top of your existing installation.

# Extract the .tar.bz2 archive
tar -jxf owncloud-10.0.3.tar.bz2 -C /var/www/

# Extract the zip archive
unzip -q owncloud-10.0.3.zip -d /var/www/

The Power User Upgrade

Rename your current ownCloud directory, for example, from owncloud to owncloud-old. Extract the unpacked ownCloud server directory and its contents to the location of your original ownCloud installation.

# Assumes that the new release was unpacked into /tmp/
mv /tmp/owncloud /var/www/

With the new source files now in place of the old ones, next copy the config.php file from your old ownCloud directory to your new ownCloud directory.

cp /var/www/owncloud-old/config/config.php /var/www/owncloud/config/config.php

If you keep your data/ directory inside your owncloud/ directory, copy it from your old version of ownCloud to your new version. If you keep it outside of your owncloud/ directory, then you don’t have to do anything with it, because its location is configured in your original config.php, and none of the upgrade steps touch it.

Upgrade the Installation

With all that done, restart your web server.

sudo service apache2 start

Disable Core Apps

Before the upgrade can run, several apps need to be disabled, if they’re enabled, before the upgrade can succeed. These are: activity, files_pdfviewer, files_texteditor, and gallery. The following command provides an example of how to do so.

sudo -u www-data php occ app:disable activity
sudo -u www-data php occ app:disable files_pdfviewer
sudo -u www-data php occ app:disable files_texteditor
sudo -u www-data php occ app:disable gallery

Market and Marketplace App Upgrades

Before getting too far into the upgrade process, please be aware of how the Market app and its configuration options affect the upgrade process.

  • The Market app is not upgraded if it is either disabled (because appstoreenabled is set to false) or it is not available.
  • If upgrade.automatic-app-update is set to false apps installed from the Marketplace are not automatically upgraded.

In addition to these two points, if there are installed apps (whether compatible or incompatible with the next version, or missing source code) and the Market app is enabled, but there is no available internet connection, then these apps will need to be manually updated once the upgrade is finished.

Start the Upgrade

With the apps disabled and the webserver started, launch the upgrade process from the command line.

# Here is an example on CentOS Linux
sudo -u apache php occ upgrade

Note

The optional parameter to skip migration tests during this step was removed in oC 10.0. See Testing a Migration for background information. See Using the occ Command to learn more about the occ command.

The upgrade operation can take anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours, depending on the size of your installation. When it is finished you will see either a success message, or an error message which indicates why the process did not complete successfully.

Disable Maintenance Mode

Assuming your upgrade succeeded, next disable maintenance mode. The simplest way is by using occ from the command line.

sudo -u www-data php occ maintenance:mode --off

Copy Old Apps

If you are using 3rd party applications, look in your new /var/www/owncloud/apps/ directory to see if they are there. If not, copy them from your old apps/ directory to your new one, and make sure that the directory permissions are the same as for the other ones.

Finalize the Installation

With maintenance mode disabled, login and:

  • Check that the version number reflects the new installation. It’s visible at the bottom of your Admin page.
  • Check that your other settings are correct.
  • Go to the Apps page and review the core apps to make sure the right ones are enabled.
  • Re-enable your third-party apps.
  • Apply strong permissions to your ownCloud directories.

Test the Upgrade

Previous versions of ownCloud included a migration test. ownCloud first ran a migration simulation by copying the ownCloud database and performing the upgrade on the copy, to ensure that the migration would succeed.

Then the copied tables were deleted after the upgrade was completed. This doubled the upgrade time, so admins could skip this test (by risking a failed upgrade) with php occ upgrade --skip-migration-test.

The migration test has been removed from ownCloud 9.2. ownCloud server admins should have current backups before migration, and rely on backups to correct any problems from the migration.

Reverse Upgrade

If you need to reverse your upgrade, see Restoring ownCloud.

Troubleshooting

When upgrading ownCloud and you are running MySQL or MariaDB with binary logging enabled, your upgrade may fail with these errors in your MySQL/MariaDB log:

An unhandled exception has been thrown:
exception 'PDOException' with the message 'SQLSTATE[HY000]: General error: 1665
Cannot execute statement: impossible to write to binary log since
BINLOG_FORMAT = STATEMENT and at least one table uses a storage engine limited to row-based logging. InnoDB is limited to row-logging when transaction isolation level is READ COMMITTED or READ UNCOMMITTED.'

Please refer to MySQL / MariaDB with Binary Logging Enabled on how to correctly configure your environment.

Occasionally, files do not show up after an upgrade. A rescan of the files can help:

sudo -u www-data php console.php files:scan --all

See the owncloud.org support page for further resources for both home and enterprise users.

Sometimes, ownCloud can get stuck in a upgrade. This is usually due to the process taking too long and encountering a PHP time-out. Stop the upgrade process this way:

sudo -u www-data php occ maintenance:mode --off

Then start the manual process:

sudo -u www-data php occ upgrade

If this does not work properly, try the repair function:

sudo -u www-data php occ maintenance:repair