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Technology

NextCloud Search Troubleshooting

After upgrading our NextCloud to version 20, our search stopped working. Search used to be fast and would search for files within the directory you were looking at. Now the search would find nothing and just do a strange animation.

As you can see pretty useless.

So like most people who run across an issue they have not seen before, they look at logs and look for error messages. Well NextCloud logs are not the easiest to view. Unlike RocketChat and other server apps where log files are a click away, NextCloud you need to open up json formatted like text files that are not pretty by anymeans. So skipping the logs I went to Google/duckduckgo to see if anyone else has had the issue.

Searching showed that others had the issue, but there was not a ton. I posed a comment on a NextCloud forum, along side someone else having the issue, in show of support as most message boards are fairly useless unless you are deep in the gears of the app. Since I have my own apps, getting deep in a new engine was not the first thing on my mind. Gears == time.

I did get a response from OiverP a NextCloud volunteer much like a response I would have given. in short Oliver said, if you got a problem, add some details so someone can help. otherwise don’t post. At least that is my go to when someone posts they have a problem, but don’t provide any details.

So not wanting to be what I don’t like it was time to spend time digging into Logs, github and any other documentation that may or may not exist for NextCloud. Since I am using Snap (Which I hate mainly because of speed) I will be posting Snap stuff, but the structure is pretty similar regardless if you are using zip, docker or manual installs.

Logs

The logs you are best to sudo copy the log files to a /home location, do a sudo chmod 777 filename to allow the file to be read with some analysis apps.

https://github.com/nextcloud/nextcloud-snap/wiki/Where-to-find-logs-of-components

  • Logs for Nextcloud can be found at: /var/snap/nextcloud/common/nextcloud/data/nextcloud.log
  • Logs for Apache can be found at: /var/snap/nextcloud/current/apache/logs/
  • Logs for Redis can be found at: /var/snap/nextcloud/current/redis/redis.log
  • Logs for PHP-FPM can be found at: /var/snap/nextcloud/current/php/php-fpm.log
  • Logs for Certbot can be found at: /var/snap/nextcloud/current/certs/certbot/logs/letsencrypt.log
  • Logs for MySQL can be found at: /var/snap/nextcloud/current/mysql/localhost.localdomain.err