I have been self-hosting a Nextcloud instance for almost two years. It is a LAMP stack in a Proxmox LXC container. The container's operating system is Debian 11, with PHP 7.2.

Up until Nextcloud 25, everything is good. I always use the web updater for minor and major Nextcloud upgrades. It wasn't always smooth sails (sometimes I need to drop into the command line to do some post upgrade stuff), but generally speaking things work as intended.

A few months ago, I heard Nextcloud 26 would deprecated PHP 7.2, which means Debian 11 would not be able to upgrade to Nextcloud 26. That's fine, because Debian 12 was just around the horizon. I can rock 25 until Debian 12 comes out in the summer.

Fast forward to yesterday, I decided to upgrade my LXC container to Debian 12 and Nextcloud from 25 to 27, since both projects just released major upgrade within the last week. How exciting! Strangely enough, in the Nextcloud web interface, under "Administration settings", it doesn't even report new version 26 or 27.

I thought "Fine, I will upgrade Debian first and then use Nextcloud web updater". Turns out, Debian upgrade went very smoothly; all php packages were bumped from 7.2 to 8.2; reboot, done. However, Nextcloud cannot be opened, the web interface says something like "This version of Nextcloud is not compatible with PHP>=8.2. You are currently running 8.2.7". I start to grind my teeth as Nextcloud throws me into this hoop. "Fine, I will manually upgrade".

Following the How to upgrade guide, I downloaded latest.zip from Nextcloud website, and start the (painful) process:

• turn maintenance mode on
• unzip the file
• copy everything except config and data into the document root located at var/www/nextcloud
• make sure user, group and permissions are correct
• added “apc.enable_cli = 1” to php cli config because of this bug
• sudo -u www-data php occ upgrade

Of course it didn't work. I went to the web interface to see why, it says "Updates between multiple major versions are unsupported". You can hear me grinding my teeth from across the street.

Finally, after a lot of faffing, I downloaded Nextcloud 26.0.2 and successfully upgraded. However, that's not the end of misery. As per usually, major upgrade always needs some cleaning up. I got half a dozen warnings under "Administration settings", like php memory_limit, file hash mismatch, cron job failed, etc. They are not difficult to fix, just hella annoying.

Just thinking about 26-27 upgrade will put me through (some of) the rigmarole again, I'm already tired. This process is stressful and tedious, especially for something you only need to do every half a year. It periodically reminds me of the bad old days of system administration. Maybe I should've opted in the docker container deployment, I don't know.

On the flip side, thank goodness I have ZFS snapshots for the container and data directory. Should something goes wrong I can always roll back.