blog.crox.net

On my Nextcloud instance (Hub 26 Spring / 34.0.2, migrated from ownCloud years ago) the admin Overview page at /index.php/settings/admin/overview simply ended after the version information. This issue appeared some time ago, and I got used to performing the updates from the CLI, but eventually I wanted to track down where it came from.

No update information, no update channel, no updater button. No JavaScript errors in the console, no failed requests, nothing in nextcloud.log. The updatenotification app was enabled and its scripts loaded fine.

Nothing was broken - the section is simply not rendered when updatechecker is false:

$ occ config:list system | grep updatechecker
        "updatechecker": false,

Deleting it seems to work, but changes nothing:

$ occ config:system:delete updatechecker
System config value updatechecker deleted

$ occ config:list system | grep updatechecker
        "updatechecker": false,

The reason: Nextcloud reads config/config.php and then merges every other config/*.config.php on top of it, while occ only ever writes to config.php. So the value has to be hunted down manually:

$ cd [nextcloud dir]
$ grep -rn updatechecker config/
config/disable-updatechecker.config.php:5:  'updatechecker' => false
$ cat config/disable-updatechecker.config.php
<?php
## https://github.com/owncloud/core/issues/22257
$CONFIG = array (
  'updatechecker' => false
);

That file was installed by the old ownCloud Debian packages: ownCloud 9.0 started shipping the web updater in the tarball, which made no sense for package installs, and the new integrity check meant they couldn't just delete the files - so they disabled the feature with a config drop-in instead (owncloud/core#22257).

Upgrades never touch config/, so it survived the migration to Nextcloud and every upgrade since - almost 10 years.

Deleting config/disable-updatechecker.config.php fixed the issue - the update section is back.