Nextcloud 21 is out

necrevistonnezr

That high performance backend for sync sounds exiting….

Changelog: https://nextcloud.com/changelog/
Announcement: https://nextcloud.com/blog/nextcloud-hub-21-out-with-up-to-10x-better-performance-whiteboard-and-more-collaboration-features/

The biggest improvements we introduce with Nextcloud 21 are:

High Performance Back-end for Nextcloud Files: reduces server load from desktop clients and web interface polling by 90% while delivering instant notifications to users.
And a wide range of performance improvements all over on top, decreasing loading times of pages and reducing load on the server
Collaborative features: new Whiteboard, author colours in Text and Document Templates to increase team productivity
Nextcloud Talk: debuts message status indicators, a raise hand feature, a group conversation description and more!
A range of Groupware improvements like drag'n'drop and nicer threading in Mail and syncing social media avatars in Contacts.

jdaviescoates

Thanks, sounds great!

@necrevistonnezr said in Nextcloud 21 is out:

Announcement: https://nextcloud.com/blog/nextcloud-hub-21-out-with-up-to-10x-better-performance-whiteboard-and-more-collaboration-features/

...but that's a 404 for me.

nebulon

Yes we saw that, however I think this time we will wait for the first patch release to be out, given the experience with previous major Nextcloud releases. I will update our package code today though, so we can get started on the testing.

jdaviescoates

@nebulon have you had a chance to look at the optional new high performance backend to files available with NC21? I'm hoping we'll all be able to use that...

MooCloud_Matt

Did anyone already try the new backend in rust?

girish

@MooCloud_Matt @jdaviescoates I haven't tried it but I think it's not enabled by default. So, I don't think we will enable it by default either. I didn't find much information about the stability of the new backend, do you have a link?

MooCloud_Matt

@girish
nope,
no information on stability found either.

This is the repo
https://github.com/nextcloud/notify_push

MooCloud_Matt

I just try the new backend on ubuntu directly and I found it interesting.

My wish was that NextCloud has started a migration to a different language, a modern one.
BUT, this is not the case what they are doing is just improving the connection for metadata with WebSocket, but all the files are still using PHP Webdav Rest-like protocol.

NextCloud.com says that been their software modular they can develop a small and incremental module (AKA rust backend), and this is good news.

But what we read also is that they want to keep PHP as the main backend to be able to have full compatibility with industry-standard hosting.

NOTE: this is my interpretation of their PR on social media, forum, and their blog post.

The conclusion for me is that NextCloud is OLD if they will not invest in a new main backend now that docker is the new industry standard and JS/TS is the new language for wild compatibility on modern hosting (both Cpanel and Plesk support nodejs app). I think that we need to look around to find a new alternative to host or files on the cloud.

nebulon

@moocloud_matt I don't think they can realistically move to some other language or even framework, since their focus was for a long time on the addons/apps and all those would have to be rewritten then.

jdaviescoates

@girish said in Nextcloud 21 is out:

I don't think we will enable it by default

Fair enough, would still be nice to be able to take advantage of it on Cloudron too though

MooCloud_Matt

@nebulon
I know that migrating all your app to a new language takes time and effort, but don't you think that now in 2021 is time to stop pushing on building new apps and improve the old ones?
OwnCloud and Pydio both are in a migration phase from the old PHP/Python-based app to modern code and container base setup.

Is maintaining PHP support something good for us as users and providers?
PHP8 support is appreciated but JS/NodeJS is much faster than PHP and offers today same compatibility on hosting platform then PHP so is good for us as the user to have always more app but kiping the nextcloud core with PHP that perform as it performs today.

nebulon

@moocloud_matt I just shared my impression of their situation. OwnCloud and the likes have not focused that heavily on 3rdparty plugins/apps and thus are in a better situation to move to something else.

oj

@girish @nebulon For users who are using Nextcloud + Nextcloud Talk for remote, collaborative work, the two Nextcloud HPB's (the Spreed SFU/ signalling HPB + this new notifications HPB binary) are very important.

My largest (non-Cloudron) Nextcloud has 22 remote users; the Spreed SFU (available as-a-service for 40 euro per month) enables them to hold their all-hands Monday video meetings. They love the new notifications binary too because it makes the Nextcloud Talk notifications "instantaneous"... especially, when receiving a call, etc. They are now doing many group audio calls.

With these two HPB's enabled, Nextcloud is arguably the best, open source, self-hostable, remote-work collaboration tool available today. Without them....well, it great for managing files....like Owncloud, Pydio, etc.

If Cloudron devs intend their Nextcloud installation to be used for collaborative, remote work, then the notifications HPB binary needs to be enabled by default. It requires a decent amount of of server-side jugglery.

jdaviescoates

@oj I think @doodlemania2 is making good progress with the High Performance Back-end for Talk.

I can see you've already upvoted that here:
https://forum.cloudron.io/post/8642

And I've just added an App Wishlist post for the High Performance Back-end for Nextcloud Files too:
https://forum.cloudron.io/post/29236

jdaviescoates

@nebulon you've probably spotted this already, but I just noticed 21.0.1 is now out - so I think that means time to update the Cloudron package, right? (I really want to try out the new whiteboard )

https://github.com/nextcloud/server/releases/tag/v21.0.1

nebulon

@jdaviescoates right, I've just updated the v20 app package and will then start testing v21 tomorrow.

nebulon

We have released the 21 package now and will be rolling it out slowly over the next week.

necrevistonnezr

@nebulon said in Nextcloud 21 is out:

We have released the 21 package now and will be rolling it out slowly over the next week.

Installed and now problems so far. Will you update to the "high-performance-backend" in the future as described here: https://github.com/nextcloud/notify_push?

imc67

@nebulon said in Nextcloud 21 is out:

We have released the 21 package now and will be rolling it out slowly over the next week.

Just updated to the new version, when you go to settings > administration > overview, you see several configuration “warnings”:

Security & setup warnings
It's important for the security and performance of your instance that everything is configured correctly. To help you with that we are doing some automatic checks. Please see the linked documentation for more information.

There are some warnings regarding your setup.
Your web server is not properly set up to resolve "/.well-known/webfinger". Further information can be found in the documentation.
Your web server is not properly set up to resolve "/.well-known/nodeinfo". Further information can be found in the documentation.

imc67

@nebulon said in Nextcloud 21 is out:

We have released the 21 package now and will be rolling it out slowly over the next week.

Logs still not working, could this be a package bug?

imc67

@imc67 said in Nextcloud 21 is out:

@nebulon said in Nextcloud 21 is out:

We have released the 21 package now and will be rolling it out slowly over the next week.

Just updated to the new version, when you go to settings > administration > overview, you see several configuration “warnings”:

Security & setup warnings
It's important for the security and performance of your instance that everything is configured correctly. To help you with that we are doing some automatic checks. Please see the linked documentation for more information.

There are some warnings regarding your setup.
Your web server is not properly set up to resolve "/.well-known/webfinger". Further information can be found in the documentation.
Your web server is not properly set up to resolve "/.well-known/nodeinfo". Further information can be found in the documentation.

@nebulon did you find time to check the new app version for this warning? Also logs still don't work.

nebulon

@imc67 indeed I can reproduce this. Not yet sure why this is not the case for newly installed instances, but the previous version didn't have those files/routes either.

nebulon

Apparently the htaccess file now has a few new rewrite rules:

  RewriteRule ^\.well-known/host-meta /public.php?service=host-meta [QSA,L]
  RewriteRule ^\.well-known/host-meta\.json /public.php?service=host-meta-json [QSA,L]
  RewriteRule ^\.well-known/webfinger /public.php?service=webfinger [QSA,L]
  RewriteRule ^\.well-known/nodeinfo /public.php?service=nodeinfo [QSA,L]

however they are all in the section where nextcloud itself says one should not modify them. Not sure how they have thought this to be handled for updates.

girish

Some of the instances are hitting "Undefined class constant ‘MAJOR_VERSION’ after upgrade to 21" . This is a bug in the nextcloud plugin/app and you have to disable that plugin following the instructions at https://docs.cloudron.io/apps/nextcloud/#fixing-a-broken-install . It seems a lot of plugins are incompatible - https://github.com/nextcloud/vm/issues/1834#issuecomment-782832104 . If you use any of these plugins, either disable the plugin or disable automatic updates to nextcloud.

You might think It turns out that occ tool itself stops working and you cannot disable plugins anymore with the CLI tool since it fails with the following error:

root@5795ea67-b3c2-4604-9710-88d1997920bd:/app/code# sudo -u www-data php -f /app/code/occ app:list
An unhandled exception has been thrown:
Error: Undefined class constant 'MAJOR_VERSION' in /app/code/3rdparty/guzzlehttp/guzzle/src/Utils.php:118
Stack trace:
#0 /app/code/3rdparty/guzzlehttp/guzzle/src/functions.php(71): GuzzleHttp\Utils::defaultUserAgent()
#1 /app/data/apps/files_external_gdrive/vendor/guzzlehttp/guzzle/src/Client.php(194): GuzzleHttp\default_user_agent()
#2 /app/data/apps/files_external_gdrive/vendor/guzzlehttp/guzzle/src/Client.php(75): GuzzleHttp\Client->configureDefaults()

It seems the fix is to put nextcloud in recovery mode and then rm -rf /app/data/apps/<plugin> and then disable recovery mode.

necrevistonnezr

@girish
That‘s real stupid by NC
The occ command should be bulletproof.

girish

@necrevistonnezr right I was hoping for a --skip-plugins or equivalent but couldn't find one (the WP cli tool has something like that for skipping loading of themes and plugins).

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