OwnCloud, php7.0-fpm and Memcache

When checking out the setup for our OwnCloud system it came up with a few cautionary problems that needed to be resolved.

The problems related to environment variables and file locking.

php does not seem to be setup properly to query system environment variables. The test with getenv(“PATH”) only returns an empty response. Please check the installation documentation ↗ for php configuration notes and the php configuration of your server, especially when using php-fpm.

and

Transactional file locking is using the database as locking backend, for best performance it’s advised to configure a memcache for locking. See the documentation ↗ for more information.

Owncloud 10.0 Upgrade

This should have been easier, but I guess I missed a few things I shouldn’t have.

I took the opportunity to upgrade Owncloud to v10.0 and also upgraded from Debian Jessie to Stretch. As there is no repository for Owncloud stretch I had to manually upgrade. Which is actually quite straight forward.

Owncloud Upgrade and Maintenance Mode

This catches me out almost every time I do an update of our Owncloud server. As it’s using a Debian repository a simple apt-get upgrade is all it takes to deploy the Owncloud upgrade, but then it sticks in maintenance mode and the upgrade hasn’t really run. It’s just downloaded and waiting deployment.

ownCloud

We needed a semi-secure method of transferring files between staff and 3rd parties. To handle those frequent times when someone tries to attach a 150MB file onto an email. OwnCloud to the rescue.

It’s come a long way since I first used it. Now it has all kinds of plugins and features. What’s good about it is there are clients for pretty much all platforms – many free. Failing that good old HTML will do.