Migrating My Nextcloud Server to Another Server

Edit: As of June 14, 2022, probably most if not all of the information found in this article is out of date! You’ll probably find better information somewhere else.

When I saw that my version of Ubuntu could not be upgraded any more (due to Digital Ocean’s system), I had to migrate my Nextcloud installation (version 11.0.2) to a newer version of Ubuntu (16.04). In the documentation for Nextcloud, it details how to exactly migrate your Nextcloud installation to another Linux server, so I tried using that. Sadly, though, they left a couple of things out. So here’s my version of how I migrated my Nextcloud installation to another server.

First of all, they say to back up your data, which is what I did (to some extent). Next, I spun up a droplet which had similar specifications to my previous installation (it uses 512MB and has 20GB of storage, for instance). I made sure to put in my usual ssh key for this new droplet, as well as securing it in other ways. At first, I thought I knew how to easily do this: copy over the /var/www/nextcloud directory to the new server (which was also set up for Nextcloud), change some directory names, and it would be done. However, this was not what I found.

When I tried this method, I couldn’t access the web interface. What was worse was that I had forgotten to change the firewall configuration on the new droplet and accidently “locked” myself out. So, through some more research, I tried it again with another droplet.

This time, I copied the files using rsync, and made sure that I used the proper switches (I used the “-a” and “-t” switches, in order to archive the files, as well as save the timestamps). I saved the files to a new directory on the server, and made sure to back up the old files. I thought that this time I had fixed the issue. But Fate can be cruel.

Even though I had copied over the files in the “correct” fashion, the server still wasn’t accessible from the web. Looking at the /var/log/apache2/error.log file, I found that the webserver couldn’t start due to Nextcloud not be able to read the database. After researching the problem more, I learned that the data can’t be just “copied” over; rather the data has to be copied, and the database has to be imported. So, after scrapping that droplet (I had changed it too much already), I spun up a new droplet, and tried this whole thing all over again.

First, I put the server into “maintenance mode” and stopped the Apache server. Then I extracted the data from the database (via the command mysql -u ownCloud -p password ownCloud > /tmp/dump.sql), copied that over to the new server, and imported it into the new database. For importing the new database, I “dropped” the old database, created a new one, and finally imported the data with the command mysql -u nextcloud -p password nextcloud < /tmp/dump/sql. Then I copied the old Nextcloud as I did before (using the official documentation’s recommendation of the command rsync -Aax) and carefully moved the files into the new /var/www/Nextcloud directory. Even through all of this, it still wasn’t enough.

Looking again at the /var/log/apache2/error.log file, I found that the new Nextcloud install couldn’t read the database due to the new server using the old Nextcloud config.php file (are you still with me?). So, I changed a few values in the config.php file so as to use the new database. What I did was change the dbname to the name of the new database, as well as input the new database login information. Also, I added the new IP address to the “trusted hosts” array in the config.php file. This seems to have fixed most of my problems.

Just in case, I also ran a script that I found in the official Nextcloud documentation for fixing the permissions on the new server. Then I changed some of the security configurations for the Apache server. I copied over previous configurations for SSL into the /etc/apache2/sites-available directory, and enabled them through the a2enmode command. With all that finished, I started up the Apache server again, and took the Nextcloud installation out of “maintenance mode”. Finally, I was able to use the server. Except, it wasn’t exactly to my liking.

You see, I had copied over the “data”, “config”, and “themes” directories. I did not copy over all of my previous apps. When I saw that I had only half of my previous apps, I thought, “I need to fix this,” and copied the contents of my previous Nextcloud’s “apps” directory to the new server. With those out of the way, I saw to using some of Nextcloud’s recommendations, and bumped up the memory (as well as putting in a timeout feature). These were harder to fix, partially because I had these problems with my previous Nextcloud installation. Nevertheless, I sought to fix them.

One of my problems was with the /var/www/nextcloud/.htaccess file, specifically that it wasn’t working. To fix this, I edited the /etc/apache2/apache.conf file and changed the AllowOverride directive for the /var/www section to “All”. This allowed the /var/www/nextcloud/.htaccess to work (at least, it would work since I’m accessing the site over a secure connection). Next, I added a memcache so as to speed up performance. I added in php-apcu and edited the /var/www/nextcloud/config/config.php file to reflect this by assigning memcache.local the value \\OC\Memcache\\APCu. My server was made much faster with this tweak. For added polish, I followed the directions on this tutorial and added Redis support.

This was a tough migration that I thought would have been easy. I figured that it would have taken a couple hours. However, it was stretched out to a numbers of hours (not to mention one night). While it’s great that I have migrated to a more manageable configuration, I should have done more research.

Jason Anderson

Jason Anderson has been hacking up computers for nearly 20 years and has been using Linux for over 15 years. Among that, he has a BBA in Accounting. Look him up on Twitter at @FakeJasonA and on Mastodon on @ertain@mast.linuxgamecast.com

2 thoughts to “Migrating My Nextcloud Server to Another Server”

  1. Hello! I’m liked very much your post, but there are several points not well explained, and I got lost. I’m also trying to move my nextcloud from a hired host to a dedicated server, but I’m facing the same problems as you did.

    Could you please help me out? Can I send you my personal login information so you can help me?

    Thanks in advance, I’d appreciate very much.

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