Migrating a hosted Nextcloud instance to your Home Lab

I finally decided to move my #NextCloud instance from one that I had been operating on the #Vultr hosting service to my #HomeLab.

A note on Vultr: I am impressed with this service. I have used them for multiple projects and paid with various means, from credit card to #cryptocurrency for about 10 years and I cannot even remember a downtime that impacted me. (In fact, I think there was only one real downtime, which was planned, well-communicated, and didn’t impact me because my setup was fairly resilient). With a growing volume of data, and sufficient spare hardware that wasn’t doing anything, I decided to bring it in-house.

This is not going to be a full guide, as there are plenty of those, but I did run into some hurdles that may be common, especially if a pre-built Nextcloud instance was used. So this is meant to provide some color and augment the official and popular documentation.

Getting started

Plan out the migration

Migration Overview

Essentially, there are three high-level steps to this process 1. Build a new Nextcloud server in the homelab 2. Copy the configuration (1 file), database (1 backup file), apps (install apps), and data (all user files) over to the new system 3. Restore all the copied data to the new instance

Preparing to Migrate

  1. Start with the NextCloud official documentation for migrating to a different server as well as:
    1. Backing up Nextcloud
    2. and the restoring a server doc
  2. Check out Nicholas Henkey’s migrate Nextcloud to a new server blog post. This is very thorough and has some great detail if you’re not super familiar with Nextcloud (because you used a pre-built instance)
  3. For the new build:
    1. A full set of installation instructions, placing [Nextcloud behind an Nginx proxy](https://github.com/jameskimmel/Nextcloud_Ubuntu/blob/main/nextcloud_behind_NGINX_proxy.md.
    2. An older install document for Installing Nextcloud on Ubuntu with Redis, APCu, SSL & Apache

Migration

While the official documentation describes the basics, the following is the steps I recommend following. This is at a medium level, providing the details, but not the specific command-line arguments (mostly).

  1. Build the new server
    1. Use your favorite flavor of Linux (I used Debian, and these notes will reflect that)
      1. install all updates,
      2. install fail2ban or similar security if you’re exposing this to the Internet.
      3. name the new system the same as the outgoing server
    2. Download the Nextcloud install from the nextcloud download site and choose either:
      1. update the current system to the latest version of whatever major version your running, and then download latest-XX.tar.bz2 where ‘XX’ is your version
      2. identify your exact version and download it from nextcloud
    3. Install the dependencies (mariaDB, redis, php, apache, etc. etc.)
      1. note: if the source server is running nginx, I recommend sticking with that for simplicity, keeping in mind that only Apache is officially supported
    4. Unpack Nextcloud
    5. Validate that it’s working
    6. Place it into maintenance mode

  2. Backup the data

    1. If using multi-factor authentication, find your recovery codes or create new ones
    2. Place the server into maintenance mode
    3. Backup the database
    4. copy the database backup to a temporary location on the new server

  3. Restore the data

    1. Restore the database
    2. copy /path/to/nextcloud/config/config.php over the existing config.php
    3. rsync the data/ directory to the new server
      1. you can remove old logs in the data directory
      2. you may need to use an intermediary step, like a USB drive. It’s best if this is ext4 formatted so you can retain attributes
      3. the rsync options should include -Aaxr you may want -v and/or --progress to get a better feel for what’s going on
      4. if rsync-ing over ssh, the switch is -e ssh
    4. If you have installed any additional apps for your Nextcloud environment, rsync the apps/ directory in the same way as the data dir above
    5. Validate the permissions in your nextcloud, data, and apps directories. Fix as necessary, see the info Nicholas Henkey’s post (linked above) for commands
    6. Redirect your A or CNAME record to the new system
    7. Configure SSL on the new system
    8. Turn off maintenance mode
    9. Log in and test! :fingers-crossed:

Troubleshooting

Hopefully everything is working. Make sure to check the logs if something is broken.

log locations – the nextcloud.log in the data/ directory – the apache logs in /var/log/apache2 – the redis logs in /var/log/redis – the system logs, accessible with journalctl

Reiterating: Remember or check for these items

These are the specific notes I took as I ran into problems that I had to work around or solve. These are incorporated in the above, so this is basically a restatement of the gotchas I ran into:

The Memcache settings should look something like the following configuration snippet. Alternatively, you could enable and use the process socket.


'memcache.local' => '\OC\Memcache\APCu',
'memcache.distributed' => '\OC\Memcache\Redis',
'memcache.locking' => '\OC\Memcache\Redis',
'redis' => [
     'host' => 'localhost',
     'port' => 6379,
],