I only rarely check the upgrade status of my Nextcloud installation, and last time I did, I got the information
Version
Nextcloud Hub 3 (25.0.13)
Update
Your version is up to date.
The information sound reassuring, but what worried me was that on Nextcloud’s Changelog page, the current version is shown as 28.0.0, and version 23 was already out of support.
What’s going on here?
Well, the release announcement for Hub 4 mentions that “This release supports the latest PHP 8.2”, but it does not indicate that it would no longer run on PHP 7, which is default for Ubuntu 20.04, or that you are strongly encouraged to upgrade your PHP version to be able to install current and future upgrades.
Checking while writing this post: System Requirements for V 25 are “PHP 7.4 (deprecated), PHP 8”, System Requirements for V 26 state “PHP 8.1”.
As posts on the Nextcloud forum show, I am not the only one to notice this problem.
My wishlist regarding the version check would certainly contain:
If the installed version is unsupported, deprecated, obsolete, out-of-use, then please say so.
If an upgrade can only be performed if a newer version of some underlying software needs to be installed (PHP 8 instead of PHP 7.4), then please say so.
Anyway, I proceeded with the Ubuntu upgrade:
After the upgrade completed, I was on Ubuntu 22.04 and PHP 8.1:
However, the Nextcloud website could not be reached:
I found that useful error messages can be found in the Apache error.log as configured in the website’s config file, and as result of the php occ command.
A couple of errors were to fix: First, disable the php7.4 module and enable the php8.1 module. (One would think that upgrading PHP through the Ubuntu upgrade would also re-wire the Apache modules accordingly)
The PHP upgrade apparently also did not upgrade the previously installed modules, as php occ tells me:
Please dear computer let PHP connect to MariaDB:
Please dear Nextcloud, will you run?
Fixing database access and XML parsing, we reached the next level in the occ text adventure:
Good!
I still got an internal error in the web browser, but no errors in occ check. What could be the problem? Hmmm maybe restart Apache?
I had web access to my Nextcloud installation again, and could proceed to update to the most current version.