Oooh, Nextcloud 20 has lots of nice new features!

jdaviescoates

Nice new dashboard, search across apps (and across connected apps), matterbridge integration for Talk, threading in email (and aliases back), and Deck now has CalDAV and lots more...

See:

https://help.nextcloud.com/t/nextcloud-hub-20-debuts-dashboard-unifies-search-and-notifications-integrates-with-other-technologies/93838

marcusquinn

@jdaviescoates Very impressive, couldn't tell when we can expect it but this link seems to suggest more info on that: https://nextcloud.com/release-channels/

necrevistonnezr

The new mail app looks very promising as well https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/mail (will only work with NC 20)

Added
Threading: related message are shown as conversations
Mailbox management: add, move, rename and delete folders and subfolders
Unified search integration: find emails everywhere, you don't even have to open Mail
Dashboard integration: see all important email at a glance when you log into your cloud
Display account quota: see how much storage your account is using
Multilevel mailbox structure: no more limits on how deeply you next your folders
Aliases: manage your identities
Collapse quoted text and signatures: hide the parts of a message that are less important, but make it possible to expand if needed
Create new folders when saving attachments

atridad

@necrevistonnezr honestly, if email, calendar, and contacts all worked well in Nextcloud I’d use it. Right now I use sogo because it integrates with cloudron mail and has a calendar and contact list for each one.

robi

They still need a native dark mode, but I found a plugin for it!

robi

@necrevistonnezr said in Oooh, Nextcloud 20 has lots of nice new features!:

The new mail app looks very promising as well https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/mail (will only work with NC 20)

Yes, we should also get Cloudron featured at the bottom of that post next to mail-in-a-box.

jdaviescoates

@robi said in Oooh, Nextcloud 20 has lots of nice new features!:

Yes, we should also get Cloudron featured at the bottom of that post next to mail-in-a-box.

Great idea, but I think they'd likely be very resistant to linking to Cloudron there as it is no longer open source, whereas everything else listed there is

But fingers and toes crossed @nebulon and @girish will make Cloudron open source again for 6.0!

So I'd put this in the box marked "yet another good reason it'd be great if Cloudron was open source again"

robi

Does NC 2.0 address some of the data management issues people have been having?

Clearning up properly, large backups, etc..

atridad

Looks pretty cool
Screen Shot 2020-10-04 at 12.20.48 AM.png

atridad

@atrilahiji It doesn't seem to break anything (as far as I can see) to upgrade. Might be worth doing? I just pulled down the repo, bumped the version, and deployed via the CLI.

jdaviescoates

@atrilahiji generally prudent to wait until the first point release i.e. 20.01 or whatever before updating the package on Cloudron.

nebulon

Indeed it looks nice. We will start testing an update soon, however based on previous experience we will likely only roll that out after the first patch release and even then slowly across our user base. Especially with those Nextcloud addons installed the installations often break and cause a lot of support tickets on our side.

atridad

@jdaviescoates oh I deployed into another app. I still have the old version hosted

necrevistonnezr

Nextcloud is now at 20.0.1
https://github.com/nextcloud/server/releases/tag/v20.0.1

Maybe @nebulon can have a look at it if it's stable enough by now?

necrevistonnezr

Announcement: https://nextcloud.com/blog/20-0-1-is-here-with-about-60-changes-get-your-update/
Official changelog: https://nextcloud.com/changelog/

nebulon

It is on our radar. Given that they introduced this new dashboard as the default view, I am working to adjust our tests. Lets see how smooth the upgrade this time around will be with Nextcloud

nebulon

I've released a new app package now for 20.0.1 but we will only roll this out slowly.

necrevistonnezr

@nebulon said in Oooh, Nextcloud 20 has lots of nice new features!:

I've released a new app package now for 20.0.1 but we will only roll this out slowly.

Just upgraded, everything seems to work fine! I had to restart the app once, afterwards I could see all update steps being taken in the logs.

atridad

Yeah worked fine for me. Seems ok so far...

luckow

update ran smoothly. ~~but most of the nextcloud apps are not compatible for the new major version~~

girish

@luckow Any on top of your head that are incompatible? I thought we are in the first patch release already...

luckow

@girish i looked into the app admin view again. Aaaannnd magic Only three of my installed apps are in the status "untested app". I do not know what happened at first view. Maybe tomatoes on my eyes or a cache topic.

atridad

@luckow Yeah when I was testing by pulling down the repo and bumping the version, it seemed like Nextcloud needed a reload to register that apps were tested.

marcusquinn

Update went smoothly, with 11 apps updated too. Great stuff!

Just Draw.io and Retention apps remain Untested for me.

Only done on my personal server as I think work production servers should wait a while for a good month of uptime and anecdotes really.

avatar1024

Anyone has found NC to be generally a little slower since the update?

It seems mine is. Definitely loading the dashboard takes a long while when opening the NC app (I have disabled now the Dashboard because of it), but even general navigation and document loading seem a little more sluggish than before.

necrevistonnezr

@avatar1024 said in Oooh, Nextcloud 20 has lots of nice new features!:

Anyone has found NC to be generally a little slower since the update?

It seems mine is. Definitely loading the dashboard takes a long while when opening the NC app (I have disabled now the Dashboard because of it), but even general navigation and document loading seem a little more sluggish than before.

Mine is slower, too, which I think is due to the "unified search" which has to index a lot of data at any time...

nebulon

The speed for nextcloud heavily depends on Nextcloud addons/apps/plugins being used. Since it is a php app this matters a lot for each request. The dashboard has pulled in quite a bit of stuff it seems...

marcusquinn

Also it will have cleared a lot of caches, so you should notice speed improve with use.

girish

With the latest nc package, there is a directory called /app/data/apache. Inside this, you will find mpm_prefork.conf. You should bump up the Nextcloud app's memory limit and also bump the values inside this file to get some better performance.

avatar1024

@girish thanks for the tips. Do you know by how much we should bump up these numbers and the app's memory limit?

girish

@avatar1024 This mostly depends on how many plugins and users you have, this is why we made it configurable. I would just play around with those values a bit to get a feel of any performance benefits. The default prefork file has some comments on what those values mean.

ei8fdb

Last night I saw the update available for NC. This made me both excited and reluctant at the same time. Excited because I'm interested to try some of the new features. Reluctant because I use my NC instances heavily for work and personal.

I'd appreciate if anyone is using any of these apps, can you confirm if the following apps are working in 20.*:

Appointments
Forms
Deck
Polls
Tasks
Bookmarks
News
Phonetrack
Music

(I am assuming the Calendar, Contacts and Mail applications are already working.)

avatar1024

@ei8fdb Yep, hopefully I'm not wrong but I think all of them have been updated to work with NC 20.

You can double check yourself by visiting https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/ and looking up each app

robi

This is where I wish we used faster more efficient webservers for our apps. So many choices.

luckow

@ei8fdb The second best way to test compatibility (after asking your friends), is to clone your current nc from a backup to a new subdomain and update it to nc 20. That is the Cloudron style

ei8fdb

@luckow Ah, never thought of that! Thanks. Tho' I have a lot of data in my personal NC so I don't know if I have the disk space!

Instead I created a new test instance and installed all the apps I currently use. So far it works well.

ei8fdb

@necrevistonnezr said in Oooh, Nextcloud 20 has lots of nice new features!:

Mine is slower, too, which I think is due to the "unified search" which has to index a lot of data at any time...

Is this speed issue still present for you?

necrevistonnezr

@ei8fdb said in Oooh, Nextcloud 20 has lots of nice new features!:

@necrevistonnezr said in Oooh, Nextcloud 20 has lots of nice new features!:

Mine is slower, too, which I think is due to the "unified search" which has to index a lot of data at any time...

Is this speed issue still present for you?

It’s gotten much better actually

ei8fdb

EDIT: From reading this Github issue in the repo for this app, it doesn't look like it yet supports Nextcloud 20.

So, definitely don't use this app in 20, or don't upgrade to 20 until it's supported.

As a (possible) help to others who want to upgrade to NC 20.

I tried to upgrade from 19.0.? to 20.0.1 a few times, each time the upgrade failed: the NC instance wouldn't start up.

I eventually tracked it down to the "External storage support for Google Drive" application. It was generating the following in the logs:

Nov 11 20:52:21 [Wed Nov 11 19:52:21.650912 2020] [php7:error] [pid 777] [client 172.18.0.1:46074] PHP Fatal error: Interface 'OCA\\Files_External\\Lib\\Config\\IBackendProvider' not found in /app/data/apps/files_external_gdrive/lib/AppInfo/Application.php on line 32, referer: https://saneux.ei8fdb.org/setting/apps/disabled/files_external_gdrive

I had this installed, but not configured.

Solution

To solve this issue (while still upgrading to 20.0.1 and get the instance restarted):

restore to my last backup (on 19.0.3)
disable the "External storage support for Google Drive" app
upgrade to 20.0.1

I tried to reenable the Google Drive app but it has caused the instance to restart and hang.

It was possible to get the NC into recovery mode, but it wasn't possible to use the occ command on commandline to disable the app.

When it hangs the only way to solve it is to downgrade to 19.0.3 again as explained above in Solution.

I'd suggest not upgrading to 20.0.1, or not using this app until a later release comes out.

nebulon

Thanks for sharing this, very useful information. Nextcloud plugins are nearly always what breaks updates. Unfortunately with php apps often those failures are not isolated.

robi

This details how to use RClone to connect or mount Google Drive externally:
https://ostechnix.com/how-to-mount-google-drive-locally-as-virtual-file-system-in-linux/

Then you can add it to NC as an external directory without using the plugin.

robi

Good News Everyone!

Google Drive now has the ability for managers to share folders, in shared drives.

marcusquinn

@robi Saw that, took them long enough as it was the first glaring omission I spotted when that feature came out to be immediately useless without. Will be migrating to Nextcloud over the next months, had enough of Google & Co.

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Oooh, Nextcloud 20 has lots of nice new features!

Solution