Debian have released the next stable version code named “BookWorm”, and so it is time to look at upgrading some of my servers. Now I have form here for things going smoothly. So I started with the server that I use to host a nextcloud instance. I mean what’s the worst that could happen? I’ve only set that server to hold my contacts, my calendar, to sync important files, to automatically backup any photos I take with my phone. It’s not like there is anything important I couldn’t afford to lose.
Now I joke here about starting with stuff that I should be careful not to lose, but I have learned the importance of backups, so I have a copy of this server’s file system (it’s not really a backup until you’ve tested a restore in anger, and I have been rather lax there). There are also important reasons for doing this server first. It is at home, so if I do screw it up I can easily get a hold of the hardware. I run NextCloud, and while the version I was on was still currently supported, the next version has been out for a little while and does not support running on php 7.4, which is the default in Bullseye, which is the version of Debian the server was running. Helpfully BookWorm comes with php 8.2, so that is much newer. So I updated the sources lists, and did a dist-upgrade.
The first thing to note is that I had installed a number of php packages directly rather than through the virtual packages (php7.4-something instead of php-something) so a number of php libraries were removed as the 7.4 versions were not compatible with php 8.2. This was both easily fixed, and entirely my own fault. But once I had dealt with that all of the applications appeared to start up fine, and function as expected. All of them except NextCloud of course. It turns out version 25 of nextcloud doesn’t support running on php 8.2, which is a bit of a hiccup for me. So once again, I have done something that I should be perfectly capable of doing, as I literally do this sort of thing for a living, and have been caught out by my own lack of preparation. On the plus side the manual upgrade of nextcloud was very straight forward, but I really should have known it was needed going in.