Migrating to Nextcloud 9

Now that Nextcloud 9 is out, many users are already interested in migration so I'd like to address the why and how in this blog post.

Edit: Nextcloud 10 is out with loads of unique features. We now also have a client! You can find out about client account migration here.

Why migrate

Let's start with the why. First, you don't have to migrate yet. This release as well as at least the upcoming releases of own- and Nextcloud will be compatible so you'll be able to migrate between them in the future. We don't want to break compatibility if we can avoid it!

Of course, right now Nextcloud 9 has some extra features and fixes and future releases will introduce other capabilities. With regards to security, we have Lukas Reschke working for us. However, we promise that for the foreseeable future we will continue to report all security issues we find to upstream in advance of any release we do. That means well ahead of our usual public disclosure policy, so security doesn't have to be a reason for people to move.

Edit: Nextcloud 10 comes with far more features on top of this. For Nextcloud 11 we have a ambitious road map already but we'll still enable migration from ownCloud 9.1 to Nextcloud 11 so you can migrate at your leisure!

Migration overview

If you've decided to migrate there are a number of steps to go through:

• Make sure you have everything set up properly and do a backup
• Move the old ownCloud install, preserving data and config
• Extract Nextcloud, correct permissions and put back data and config
• Switch data and config
• Trigger the update via command line or the web UI

Note that we don't offer packages. This has been just too problematic in the past and while we might offer some for enterprise distributions, we hope to work together with distributions to create packages for Nextcloud 9 and newer releases. Once that is done we will of course link to those on our installation page.

There are other great resources besides this blog, especially this awesome post on our forums which gives a great and even more detailed overview of a migration with an Ubuntu/NGINX/PHP7/MariaDB setup.

Edit: With regard to packages, there are now packages for CentOS and Fedora and other distributions will likely follow soon. See our packages repository if you want to help!

Preparation

First, let's check if you're set up properly. Make sure:

• You are on ownCloud 8.2.3 or later
• Make sure you have all dependencies
• Your favorite apps are compatible (with ownCloud 9), you can check this by visiting the app store at apps.owncloud.com
• You made a backup

Once that's all done, time to move to the next step: cleaning out the old files.

Removing old files

In this step, we'll move the existing installation preserving the data and configuration.

• Put your server in maintenance mode. Go to the folder ownCloud is installed in and execute sudo -u www-data php occ maintenance:mode --on (www-data has to be your HTTP user). You can also edit your config.php file and changing 'maintenance' => false, to 'maintenance' => true,.
• Now move the data and config folder out of the way. Best to go to your webserver folder (something like /var/www/htdocs/ and do a mv owncloud owncloud-backup

Deploying Nextcloud

Now, we will put Nextcloud in place.

• Grab Nextcloud from our download page or use wget: wget https://download.nextcloud.com/server/releases/nextcloud-9.0.50.zip
• Optional: you can verify if the download went correct using our MD5 code, see this page. Run md5sum nextcloud-9.0.50.zip. The output has to match this value: 5ae47c800d1f9889bd5f0075b6dbb3ba
• Now extract Nextcloud: unzip nextcloud-9.0.50.zip or tar -xvf nextcloud-9.0.50.tar.bz2
• Put the config.php file in the right spot: cp owncloud-backup/config/config.php nextcloud/config/config.php
• Now change the ownership of the files to that of your webserver, for example chown wwwrun:www * -R or chown www-data *
• If you keep your data/ directory in your owncloud/ directory, copy it to your new nextcloud/ [*]. If you keep it outside of owncloud/ then you don't need to do anything as its location is in config.php.

* Note that if you have been upgrading your server from before ownCloud 6.0 there is a risk that moving the data directory causes issues. It is best to keep the folder with Nextcloud named 'owncloud'. This also avoids having to change all kinds of settings on the server, so it might be a wise choice in any case: rename the nextcloud folder to owncloud.

Now upgrade!

Next up is restarting the webserver and upgrading.

• Restart your webserver. How depends on your distribution. For example, rcapache2 restart on openSUSE, service restart apache2 on Ubuntu.
• You can now trigger the update either via OCC or via web. Command line is the most reliable solution. Run it as sudo -u apache php occ upgrade from the nextcloud folder. This has to run as the user of your webserver and thus can also be www-data or www for example.
• Then, finally, turn of maintenance mode: sudo -u www-data php occ maintenance:mode --off
  

That's it!

At this point, you'll see the fresh blue of a Nextcloud server! If you encounter any issues with upgrading, discuss them on our forums.

On Open Source, forking and collaboration: Nextcloud 9 is here!

The nature of Open Source is, in a sense, dualistic. It encourages collaboration through the threat of not collaborating--a fork. When I was approached by Struktur AG to join them to work on ownCloud and Spreed, I loved the idea. I always wanted an ecosystem around ownCloud, which is why I pushed things forward like our collaboration with Western Digital Labs and Collabora, matters of no business interest to the company I worked for. I believe a stronger ecosystem benefits everybody.

Ecosystems and confidence

A major point which makes open source so beneficial for businesses is that it puts pressure on suppliers to offer great service and support. If they don't, another can enter the market and out-service them. Tight control over the community tough things like CLA and trademark makes it hard to grow such an ecosystem and negates some of the benefits of open source for customers.

Luckily, in the end, the AGPL license protects the future of a project, even if its steward clings to power. From conversations with Niels early on, it was clear to me that he has a very different and very confident view on his ability to run a real open source company. His history at Red Hat results in frequent comparisons. And indeed, Red Hat runs things the right way, even supporting a project like CentOS which many other companies would consider an existential threat to their business model. Just as their investment in opensource.com shows: they aim to grow the pie, not grab a bigger slice.

former 'enterprise feature' done right (and open)

I'm super proud and happy that we could announce today, with our first release, that Nextcloud will not be doing proprietary code. No closed apps means no inherent conflict between sales and community management/developers within the company, but a full alignment in one simple direction: servicing the customer.

And if you wonder about the collaboration with Collabora/LibreOffice Online and with Western Digital: yes, of course, we'll go full steam ahead and will facilitate where we can! No, we're not afraid that either would 'compete' with us: both will complement and strengthen the ecosystem. So we will work together.

Why? Because the core contributors and founder shared an ambitious goal for Nextcloud: be THE solution for privacy and security.

BBQ and forking

Last night we had our first Nextcloud BBQ! Despite some rain it's a good start of something that should be a tradition. ;-)

It was great to have conversations with the contributors who visited us as well as some downtime with the team. It's been a busy time since we announced our new endeavor. And it continues to be awesome to get so many supportive comments and feedback on what we're up to! People are excited about our open strategy and appreciate the fact that there is a solid company behind it. The flood of incoming requests for information and support from customers presents a good problem. So let me point out, again, that we're hiring!

Nextcloud hackweek and open BBQ!

Yesterday we kicked off a meeting in Stuttgart to discuss Nextcloud and get work done. A first result is the establishment of the new Server repository on Github (and more repositories!) and we'll share other things on the forums and in Github issues the coming days. The real important news however is that we decided to organize a BBQ!

If you're in the area, we'd love to see you show up Wednesday at Egilolfstraße 31, Plieningen/Hohenheim close to Stuttgart Airport. Nearest public transport would be either U3 Plieningen or S2/3 Flughafen/Messe. Join us starting 6PM for the good times!


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We'll have some alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages, meat, fruits, veggie stuff and of course a BBQ. Give us a shout if you're coming on the forums!

You are Nextcloud, too - what we will do for contributors

Cool stuff we want to do more with!

Based on feedback collected from many contributor members we've defined some plans and already made changes to how Nextcloud will be developed. Improved transparency and governance, focus on stability and architectural improvements and other improvements are covered in this blog. Much more is coming, you can join the conversation right now on our forums!

Community Input

January 2015, I ran a contributor survey to see what the ownCloud community thought about the processes, development focus and our work at the company. I shared the results by the end of April and pushed internally for the feedback to be taken serious. Some of the changes were implemented but many others were left for a future project to push forward. And Nextcloud will.

feedback and changes

Nextcloud aims to build a sustainable business, not limited by short-term, next-quarter thinking. The relationship with our community of contributors and users is central to our plans.

To quote Frank on this:

The company shouldn't be involving the community more in decision making; that's the wrong way of looking at it. There shouldn't be a fundamental separation to begin with!

And that's what we want. Saying "we're more open" just means being a more friendly ruler - Nextcloud aims to be a participant, not a king, benevolent or not! That is not to say that there should not be any direction but it shouldn't be dictated by a company anymore. Of course, people can decide what they work on, and the company gets to decide what it pays its employees to do. Now there are changes in how we manage our employees too, with far less micromanagement and more freedom. But that's for another blog.

Let's go over the specific pieces of feedback mentioned in the email and received from contributors in other ways and note how Nextcloud intends to address them.

Development

ownCloud is fun and relatively easy to contribute to, with a mostly well running review process and release cycle. There were some practical requests and suggestions as well as concerns about the strain the growth of our project has put on the core developers.

Dealing with Pull Requests

A major issue as detailed in many comments was that it often takes too long for pull requests to be merged. That is, contributions are not handled fast or at all. The result is that, with Core moving fast, contributions get out of sync, no longer apply and are effectively lost. As the graphs below show, the number of pull requests taking longer than 6 months to be merged is rising rapidly while the company is contributing less to development relative to volunteers. Don't get me wrong, it's great to have a growing community! But the support for development from the company needs to keep up with the pace.

Respecting contributions by being responsive and getting them merged will be our number one development priority at Nextcloud. As research by Mozilla has shown, reacting swiftly to contributions is crucial for growing community and we intend to grow and nurture our contributor base, recognizing outside input as a key driver of growth and success.

More stability

A general point made was that it'd be good to focus more on stability and performance. Some of that has been implemented with the 8.x series and automated testing improvements done over the last year. An especially sore point in terms of stability is the upgrade process, as was very visible with the 9.0 release that is still not available for users of the built in updater app. We will soon blog about the Nextcloud plans with regard to the updater.

Architectural improvements

It was mentioned that some parts of ownCloud are in need of serious architectural love and refactoring. ownCloud has been traditionally rather restrained in this regard and people worried that this "impairs competent developers". While being conservative is important with regards to building a platform (stability and compatibility!) many improvements made their way into the 8 and 9 releases. To preserve a healthy balance, we want to introduce an Architecture team to make decisions that have a big impact on the code base. More details will follow.

Another area of improvement would be to communicate more about architectural changes. Frank has already done a series of blogs about Federation in the past and more will follow.

Apps: support for Calendar, Contacts and Spreed

Many pointed out that apps are extremely important for ownCloud and we should work more on that. Frank has always emphasized the importance of building a platform and for Nextcloud this will be a central goal.

Nextcloud will officially support the Calendar and Contacts apps and supercharge their development. The Spreed.ME app will bring fully supported audio and video chat to ownCloud. We'll also invest in growing and improving our API for these and other applications.

Process

Some smallish process improvements were requested. More logical labels and tags, for example, which have been pretty much cleaned up since then. Another thing was that big pull requests are often a pain in the ass to get merged and we should tell contributors to cut their work in smaller pieces. This was added to the documentation.

Decision making

Most people were positive about the technical direction of ownCloud - test-driven, stability, architectural work, those were great improvements. Decision making processes in the technical area were not considered very transparent. Comments were even more harsh about the project-wide decision making process.

People feel decisions are often done behind closeddoors. Nextcloud will address this, in part by a new architecture team and in another part by getting rid of most 'hidden' communication channels like internal IRC and mailing lists. We also plan on talking more about our goals and plans in blogs and such.

Longer term planning is a major sticking point: there is little of it public. We need to discuss, together, how to do longer term planning. This doesn't fit too well with github. Thoughts welcome!

Communication channels

Several people have noted that we've got too many, confusing and overlapping communication channels. We've already eliminated one: mailing lists. We still have a newsletter for those who want to follow us and the blog roll on nextcloud.com/news. For technical discussions we keep using github (which now links commits to pull requests so you can find the discussion behind code) and we'll discuss more general subjects on the forum. Speaking of which, it's now on discourse - a massive improvement I'd say. And email fans can use email to communicate with people on the forum!

Governance

It was already mentioned here and there but there are two other big changes. First, we want the Nextcloud trademarks to be owned by the community, like the ownCloud one should have been. So we will set up a foundation soon which will control the trademark (not have it sub-licensed!) and more in the future.

Second, we will get rid of the Contributor License Agreement. You don't need to sign anything to contribute to Nextcloud.

Third, without CLA there are no proprietary apps part of Nextcloud. We won't be artificially crippling Nextcloud just to get some checkmark on a feature list on the enterprise side. At the same time, of course much functionality is needed for companies, stuff that they need (and home users don't). We will provide that for sure, including migration path, but this time as stand-alone tools. No more exclusivity for a single company, allowing it to do things others can't for legal reason. Our power is in employing the people who write the code, so we can give the best support and develop the best features. If another comes and tops us, well, we should've done better.

Users

There will be improvements for users, too. Already mentioned were our plans to support the Calendar and Contacts apps, Mail too, perhaps more. And of course with Spreed.ME we will integrate open source, WebRTC based video conferencing. There is more coming - for a future blog!

That's all? Nope.

Now I know this is a long blog with lots of details. No surprise, it is based on things we've wanted to improve for many years but could not. Now we can and we will. This is not the end of it, other suggestions and thoughts are more than welcome. Get involved!

Nextcloud is the future of open source file sync and share

So today is the day: we announce that we're forking ownCloud at some point the coming weeks. We includes project founder Frank and the core ownCloud contributors who publicly quit ownCloud, Inc. over the last weeks - Lukas, Arthur, Morris, Bjoern, Jan-Christoph and quite a few others as well who can't talk about that yet. As of now, most of the top contributors to ownCloud core are joining and of course, we're very busy hiring and aim to leave no (wo)man behind.

'why' is the question everybody has and I hope you understand I don't want to talk too much about that. Instead, let me talk about what we are going to do.

A healthy Nextcloud

Open source projects work best when they have a company behind them which aims to build a sustainable business around a symbiotic relationship with the community they are a part off. Make no mistake, I think it's great if people (investors, founders) can cash out big. They take a risk, put in blood, sweat and tears. But venture capital often leads to short term thinking and chasing of quarterly numbers resulting in bad decisions. Money, time and effort is wasted and growth isn't what it could be - and that's pretty much a best case scenario.

The good news is that we're starting a new company, Nextcloud, which will do things right: build a sustainable, durable business. We've got support from Niels Mache, long time open source entrepreneur and owner of the spreed video conferencing business. Nextcloud will integrate with spreed's successor, the open source, webRTC based spreed.me video conferencing software, kickstarting as a healthy, growing business with loads of customers while the integration provides a real valuable new feature to users.

What we will offer

This reboot of ownCloud is meant to be good for users, customers and contributors alike. So we'll be providing a drop-in replacement for users next month, which will bring them the stability and security updates they need as well as full spreed.ME video conferencing integration.

For customers, the drop-in replacement will be accompanied with a Enterprise Subscription which gives them all the support and features they are used to. Better, even: we will honor all contracts so nobody has to pay twice or get in trouble. On top of that we plan to support some of the most popular apps like Calendar and Contacts both for home users and enterprises. Our goal here is to ensure nobody is left without the support they need to be happy, successful own/Nextcloud users.

We're setting up infrastructure now for the wider contributor community to join us. We've got some improvements in store, including new forums (discourse based), no more Contributor License Agreement and a foundation that will hold trademarks (not have them sub-licensed; nor be under company control!). January last year we did a survey of what community contributors would like to see improved and, finally, we can implement many of those requests. I will blog more about that later today!

Future

I know that this is a surprise to everybody and it isn't that you should be joining RIGHT NOW or I'll hate you forever, on the contrary. ownCloud is a very important project and a rash decision makes no sense. We are in it for the long haul, our goal is a smooth transition and that means we will take some time to prepare things on our end. We've always been in close contact with our contributors and this new thing can only be open and public from now on so let's take our time to do this right. Over the coming days we'll blog about our plans and you can provide input and help us make the right decisions!

This endeavor will take some time and effort, but successful examples like LibreOffice and MariaDB have shown that, in the end, the community will find a way to get it right. I'm confident that we will be able to deliver even better solutions for our users and customers thanks to a redefined, more open community and company relationship!

Check out our announcement blog, our website and ping me or ask your questions in our Live Nextcloud Q&A Hangout with Frank and myself, moderated by Bryan Lunduke, today at 19:00 PM Berlin/Amsterdam/Paris time, 10:00 AM Pacific time.

And yes, if you want to join us, send an email, we're hiring!