Maintenance releases for Hub 4, 5 and 6

Minor releases deal with updater problem

We’ve encountered a problem with the automatic updater and decided to do a quick update with fixes. While at it, the latest Hub 6 (27.1) also got a minor update.

If you got stuck on an update, you will notice it complains about some unexpected files:

The following extra files have been found:
    package-lock.json
    composer.lock
    package.json
    composer.json

When you delete these files, and resume the upgrade, things will continue just fine. The updates from today also resolve the issue. If you are already on 26.0.6 or 25.0.11, best remove these files before the next update and then move to 26.0.7 or 25.0.12.

You can find the full changelog of fixes and improvements for these releases on our website. As said, the changes are minor for most releases, with things like hiding shares by disabled users, some minor caldav fixes, correct reporting of the size of encrypted files and a fix for loading comments being added to all 3 releases. Note that Hub 4 (25.x) will get only 1 more update, after which we strongly recommend you update to Hub 5 or move to Nextcloud Enterprise for up to 5 years of updates.

Desktop client 3.10

The Desktop Client team last week made 3.10 available, together with the release of Nextcloud Hub 6. This is a major release with a ton improvements. The biggest is that, in addition to locking files that are being edited on the server, the client can now also detect files being opened locally in Microsoft Office and LibreOffice, and lock the files on the server (and other clients). This can help avoid conflicts between multiple users editing the same file.

Here is a list of other, smaller improvements:

• Files that are deleted on the server can now optionally go to the trash on the client. This was available for Linux but now also on Windows and MacOS.
• There is now a warning when a new folder goes over the folder size limit, so you can choose to stop syncing it.
• Sync issues are now always on top of the activity list, so conflicts for example can be resolved even easier.
• Share dialog now has ‚allow resharing‘ option and suggests a password when passwords are set as mandatory on the server
• File locking works better with virtual files
• Improved migration from ownCloud to Nextcloud

A lot of other improvements to network and conflict handling, dealing with notifications, end-to-end encryption and bulk upload have been made as well. Support for uploading multi-part chunks to S3 will make the use of object storage much faster, especially with large files, but only when S3 is used as primary storage.

You can find the full changelog here.

Note: There will be no more releases of Nextcloud Hub 2 (24.x.x and older). Upgrade to Nextcloud Enterprise to continue to get security and stability updates or move to Nextcloud Hub 3 or Hub 4. Don’t forget that running web-facing software without regular updates is risky. Please stay up to date with Nextcloud releases of both the server and its apps, for the safety of your data! Customers can always count on our upgrade support if needed.

Note²: PHP 7.x is no longer officially supported by the PHP community. Nextcloud has supported PHP 8.0 and newer versions for some time now, and we strongly recommend you move to a newer version of PHP. Version 8.0 is already out of active support (!) and has only a few weeks of security updates left. Nextcloud Hub 3 (25.0.x) deprecates PHP 7.4 but still works with it. Still we recommend you use PHP 8.1 or newer. Hub 4 and newer support PHP 8.2.

Ready to move to Nextcloud Hub 6?

Nextcloud Hub 5 was released just this weekend and we recommend that you check it out to see if you can benefit from its latest features. A quick summary:

💡 100% local, private AI assistant that can summarize your mail threads and help you write, translate, dictate and more
🗣️ Show speaking time, 1 hour call warning for a healty meeting culture
🔔 File, chat & mail reminders so you don’t always have to JUMP immediately on what’s new
🤖 Bots in Talk to help you summarize meetings and bring content from other tools in Talk
🗃️ New file selector to make navigating your files easier, and updated share flow to simplify sharing
✨ NEW: developers can now write apps in ANY language, not just PHP!
➕ Much, much more!

Check out the full release announcement here.

Stay safe: keep your server up-to-date!

Minor Nextcloud releases are security and functionality bug fixes, not rewrites of major systems that risk user data! We also do extensive testing, both in our code base and by upgrading a series of real-world systems to the test versions. This ensures that upgrades to minor releases are generally painless and reliable. As the updates not only fix feature issues but also security problems, it is a bad idea to not upgrade!

If you are maintaining a mission-critical Nextcloud system for your enterprise, it is highly recommended that you get yourself some insurance (and job security… who gets blamed if the file handling system isn’t working as expected?). A hotline to the core Nextcloud developers is the best guarantee for reliable service for your users, and the job safety of you as a system administrator.