And it failed spectacularly.

We only needed a simple form, but we wanted to be fancy, so we used “nextcloud forms”.

The docker image automatically updated the install to nextcloud 30, but the forms app requires nextcloud 29 or lower. No warning whatsoever. It’s an official app, couldn’t they wait that it was ready for NC 30 before launching it? The newsletter boasts “NC hub 9 is the best thing after sliced bread” yet i don’t see any difference both in visual or performance compared to NC hub 2

Conclusion: we made our business to rely on nextcloud forms as a signup form, but the only reason we were using it was disabled who knows how many weeks ago.

  • JASN_DE@lemmy.worldEnglish
    22·
    3 months ago

    Wait, you update productions systems without running a staging environment? Or even checking the update notes and your installed apps? Also no backups? What kind of business are you running over there?

    • Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.techEnglish
      9·
      3 months ago

      Oh, Nextcloud docker is a joke. They follow no standards or best practices when it comes to docker. They keep the entire app directory mounted as a volume, which means it does upgrade you without you “needing” to upgrade the docker image. They have volumes within volumes they need to mount. Their configs can (and do) override environment variables. Most actions that need to be taken require running an occ command which can only be done by exec’ing into the container.

      Nextcloud docker is honestly just such a joke. They should have rethought their application from a docker sense and they didn’t. God just number one - Docker images should never update. It’s a freaking pinned version for a reason. If I want to update, it should be as simple as upping the version tag, and it does any upgrades in place when I do that.

      I honestly steer people away from Nextcloud now because of how mismanaged their images are.

      • Possibly linux@lemmy.zipEnglish
        1·
        3 months ago

        The images work fine for me. The problem is that Nextcloud is a complex app that doesn’t really work with the design of one container to do one job. It is pretty much a regular application that uses docker for packaging.

      • Max-P@lemmy.max-p.meEnglish
        1·
        3 months ago

        Yep, and I’d guess there’s probably a huge component of “it must be as easy as possible” because the primary target is selfhosters that don’t really even want to learn how to set up Docker containers properly.

        The AIO Docker image is an abomination. The other ones are slightly more sane but they still fundamentally mix code and data in the same folder so it’s not trivial to just replace the app.

        In Docker, the auto updater should be completely neutered, it’s the wrong way to update the app.

        The packages in the Arch repo are legit saner than the Docker version.

        • Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.techEnglish
          0·
          3 months ago

          I had to learn how to mount subpaths for their terrible container, and god just the updater is mind boggling. And I have to store their code in a volume, because of course I have to, why would code and configuration ever need to be… configurable? I actually just tried to put their config.php into a ConfigMap just to try, and of course PHP doesn’t allow that - not that I blame PHP for it - but ffs it’s been years, it’s time to allow config to also come from a yaml or something.

    • yggstyle@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      3 months ago

      To be fair a certain security company was in global news for exactly that same send it behavior. Why waste precious resources on multiple instances? Investors hate waste. 😅

    • Moonrise2473@feddit.itOPEnglish
      01·
      3 months ago

      Yes no staging because it’s something used at most by 2 concurrent users, we were ok with 95% reliability (we discovered it was disabled after at least two weeks lol)

      Otherwise we would just have signed up to one of the many cloud forms sites at $100/year

      Backups daily but it’s unthinkable to revert something like nextcloud to a months old one

      Subscribed to both newsletter and RSS feed to know about issues (the command to update the docker images isn’t automated but manually issued). The maintainer of the forms app is nextcloud itself so any incompatibility should have been written in red bold characters in the blog posts and newsletter.

      • Possibly linux@lemmy.zipEnglish
        3·
        3 months ago

        Why are your backups so out of date? Just setup daily snapshots and call it a day if it isn’t critical. You never want to update major versions first thing. Wait 3 months and then update.

        This smells like shadow IT

        • Moonrise2473@feddit.itOPEnglish
          11·
          3 months ago

          I have daily backups and hourly zfs snapshot. The problem is that, because nobody used the useless survey plugin, I have no idea when it broke. It could have been yesterday or it could have been 4 months ago

  • Possibly linux@lemmy.zipEnglish
    8·
    3 months ago

    Why did you do automatic updates without testing? That is the real issue.

    Honestly your IT department sounds like it could use some help

    • Moonrise2473@feddit.itOPEnglish
      18·
      3 months ago

      Manual docker upgrade issued my me after reading the official blog and newsletter. The upgrade notes described the new version as the best thing ever and didn’t mention that one of their selling points would be disabled without any notice.

      I’m starting to see a pattern in those comments like “why did you wear a skirt that night? It looks like you asked for it…”

      • gamermanh@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        6·
        3 months ago

        I’m starting to see a pattern in those comments like “why did you wear a skirt that night? It looks like you asked for it…”

        Cute victim mentality, but gross and insanely wrong comparison

        Learn from your mistake and don’t update without testing next time, it’s 100% on whoever updates the production environment to make sure that shit isn’t broken for whatever reason before pushing it customer-side

        It’s more like you bought a random white powder from your dealer without asking what it was and are now upset you almost died

          • gamermanh@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
            61·
            3 months ago

            Literally just googled “nextcloud forms” and looked at their supported versions and whaddya know, it says right on that webpage that there’s no stable version for 30 yet, so safe bet would be that it wouldn’t properly work when upgrading:

            There is a supported nightly build, though, so you could probably have tried that

            It’s on you to look up what will break when you update, or to test and see what happens when you do. A major update page isn’t going to list all of the things that rely on it that break because that’s fucking unreasonable

            • Moonrise2473@feddit.itOPEnglish
              15·
              3 months ago

              go to watch who is the maintainer of nextcloud forms, then see if they could have known that NC 30 was about to go out or not

              It’s definitely not unreasonable that if I make product X and I make product Y, and they’re not compatible, then a bit of warning is suggested.

              Again, wordpress updates break plugins all the time, but automattic plugins (same people of wordpress) never break. Coincidence? They just launch a new wordpress without checking if woocommerce or jetpack don’t work?

              • gamermanh@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
                3·
                3 months ago

                then a bit of warning is suggested

                Which was given by the app that gets broken by the update

                Windows doesn’t tell you that upgrading to 11 will break x, y, and z that you have installed, you’re expected to go to the sites for those programs and check if they work. Same exact idea

                The same company making both apps is never a guarantee that they’ll play nice day 1, for many reasons

                I’ll repeat: learn from your mistake instead of blaming other people for your naivete. If an app is important and might break during an update of something: check the apps documentation to see if it supports said update

                • Moonrise2473@feddit.itOPEnglish
                  14·
                  3 months ago

                  Ok i get it, it’s best practice to do rushed releases without QA because users are the free testers.

                  They definitely had no way to know that their own app was incompatible, this is definitely a problem of the stupid user. Idiot user who believed their newsletter “update now, hub 9 is the best thing ever”. The user should have known that stable = untested beta

                  Also, this issue happened exclusively to me in the whole world, because everyone else isn’t an idiot like me and checks 30+ release notes scattered in 30 different repositories to guess any incompatibility. I was lazy and only checked the main notes! Such an idiot! Why I didn’t check every single installed app? It’s just 30! Nextcloud devs couldn’t have known that nextcloud devs didn’t update the manifest of the forms app! I should have checked before! Completely my fault!

                  Now if you excuse me I got an update to the Windows nextcloud desktop app and it must reboot after update because reasons even if there’s a GitHub issue with 200 angry comments about that. No wait! Stupid me! First I have to fire a VM and use a whole week to write automated tests that account for every possible combination of settings, language, power management, installed apps and so on. Otherwise I could lose a worthless survey that nobody reads and that will definitely get me fired!

      • non_burglar@lemmy.worldEnglish
        6·
        3 months ago

        Whoah, dude.

        Not only are you being told what could have and will ward off unplanned breakage, but you have somehow characterised yourself as an unsuspecting victim here? Inaccurate and really inappropriate comparison.

        You knew enough to take on deploying a service, now comes the grown-up part where you hedge against broken updates.

        • Moonrise2473@feddit.itOPEnglish
          05·
          3 months ago

          I don’t know if maybe it’s my bad english in explaining it or it’s your comprehension skills that lack something.

          I write it again for the 10th time: I’m 100% ok having 1-2 weeks of downtime, and this is why i do it live. It simply doesn’t make sense to dedicate several hours every month on testing if all i need is getting 3 useless surveys filled per year. If it was essential for work and i needed 99.99999% uptime i would directly subscribe typeform or surveymonkey. If tomorrow my install completely bricks and disappears in thin air, i would have lost 30 minutes of time and no valuable data. I literally spent more time designing the logo for the instance than managing it. This is just to state how unimportant the data stored on it.

          This post wasn’t made about “oh no i lost millions and all my irreplaceable data thanks to nextcloud stupid updates” but how stupid is to release something that breaks features that they’re using as selling point.

          ok, now that we established that my IT skills are lacking and i should be fired because one single survey couldn’t be filled, this is the release notes: https://docs.nextcloud.com/server/latest/admin_manual/release_notes/upgrade_to_30.html

          Please tell me where they say that this feature is automatically disabled and also tell me why you think that this is acceptable.

          I don’t understand why you think that is acceptable.

          I even can’t find other examples where a release is so rushed, that selling points are disabled without ETA. I never saw for Libreoffice 24 dropping support for opendocument files for a couple months just because they had to meet a self imposed deadline

  • irotsoma@lemmy.worldEnglish
    6·
    3 months ago

    Docker automatically upgrades if you tell it to by specifying “latest” or not specifying a version number. But it only upgrades if you issue the pull command or the compose up command. There are ways to start without a pull like using start or restart. So yes, there was warning and something you did actively told it to upgrade.

    And it’s really bad practice to update any software without testing, especially between breaking/major version numbers.

    Finally, it’s not uncommon for a platform to release its update and then the plugins or addons to follow. Especially with major updates that require lots of testing before release. This allows plugin/add-on makers to fully test their software with the release version of the platform rather than all of the plugin makers having to wait for one that may be lagging behind.

    • Moonrise2473@feddit.itOPEnglish
      08·
      3 months ago

      You again commented on the docker upgrade comment that I said it’s irrelevant. It’s really like saying “if you wore pants that day, they wouldn’t have done that, it’s your fault”. It doesn’t make sense to spend $1000 in operating costs to host a useless survey that gets 3 responses a year. If it breaks for a week nobody dies.

      Focus on how they’re moving fast and breaking things, ok? It’s not normal that official plugins don’t support the latest stable release. It’s not an alpha, it’s not a beta, it’s stable. Stable means everything needs to work. Official plugins need to support the latest stable release. It’s acceptable only if this was a third party plugin made by a hobbyist in their free time

      WordPress updates also break many plugins but it never happened that a stable release blocked official ones like woocommerce.

      By the way, now I have learned that the latest version of nextcloud is a public beta and it’s better to always stay one version behind. So why don’t they call it public beta?

  • ShortN0te@lemmy.mlEnglish
    51·
    3 months ago

    The docker image automatically updated the install to nextcloud 30, but the forms app requires nextcloud 29 or lower.

    Lol. Do not blame others for your incompetence. If you have automatically updates enabled then that is your fault when it breaks things. Just pin the major version with a tag like nextcloud:29 or something. Upgrading major versions automatically in production is a terrible decision.

    • Moonrise2473@feddit.itOPEnglish
      0·
      3 months ago

      They’re releasing a new version every two month or so and dropping them rapidly from support, pinning it with a tag means that in 12 months the install would be exploitable.

      Now, I did directly to production because this is low priority stuff, but it would have happened even with a testing stage. I would have never noticed that the forms apps was disabled, the system disabled it without any notification.

      You would expect that an official app supports the latest release, no?

      This wasn’t an app released by a nobody in their free time, this is a main feature heavily advertised in their blog. Look by yourself:

      https://nextcloud.com/blog/nextcloud-forms-to-keep-your-surveys-private/

      It’s not unreasonable to get pissed when 6 months after that blog post it doesn’t support the latest release anymore.

    • Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.techEnglish
      12·
      3 months ago

      Docker images should never self update - that’s an anti pattern. They should be static code. The only time I would expect a docker image to “auto update” is if I was using the “latest” or “stable” tag and Compose/Kubernetes/I repull the image - but the image should never update itself.

      Yes, OP bit off more than they could chew. Nextcloud, however, is breaking the entire purpose of Docker images by having an auto-updater at all.

      • GBU_28@lemm.eeEnglish
        2·
        3 months ago

        If you say

        Thing:latest

        and then redeploy your compose file or what not,

        well, you’re getting the latest!

          • Possibly linux@lemmy.zipEnglish
            31·
            3 months ago

            That is a very bad idea. Use the stable tag instead. Better yet, create an Ansible playbook that updates the containers in bulk and then manually run it when you have time.

            • Scott@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
              2·
              3 months ago

              Naw I mostly do it for my own personal shit, can’t be fucked to update Plex 3 times a week and so on with other homelab stuff. Everything production is tagged with gitops version managed kubernetes manifests

              Edit: should also mention I build quite a bit of the software being deployed

  • ikidd@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    3 months ago

    The forms app is useless. It’s basically for surveys. I can’t see how you’d use it for signups.

  • adr1an@programming.devEnglish
    1·
    3 months ago

    Not to flame you, but really just an HTML form was all you needed? It’s a super simple feature…

    • Moonrise2473@feddit.itOPEnglish
      1·
      3 months ago

      sure, but why solve problems in 10 minutes when i can do it way more sophisticated using 10x more time and resources?

      (at the moment reverted to the easy html form + php send mail)

  • matzler@lemmy.mlEnglish
    1·
    3 months ago

    Specify a Version Tag in docker compose and update nextcloud deliberately through the webapp, that way it doesn’t update automatically on a pull

  • Meldrik@lemmy.wtfEnglish
    11·
    3 months ago

    No offence, but is Docker really the best way of running NC in a professional environment? Also, if you don’t want Docker to upgrade to latest image, don’t use the “latest” tag in your configuration.

    • Possibly linux@lemmy.zipEnglish
      21·
      3 months ago

      Yes, docker is the best way. Anything else is hell. It is still painful with docker but at least it is manageable

    • Moonrise2473@feddit.itOPEnglish
      1·
      3 months ago

      Us too, we only use it as a filelink provider for thunderbird and to host a useless survey that’s going to get filled once a quarter. That’s why nobody noticed the survey was disabled and that’s why we’re not doing multistage testing in multiple virtual machines. We are a super small company and ok with something that one day can be 3 days offline. Otherwise it would be cheaper to pay $100 to Surveymonkey and $100 to Dropbox