OCCWeb terminal (maintained fork)

A web terminal for admins to launch Nextcloud's occ commands

About this fork

The original Adphi/occweb was marked deprecated by its author and is unmaintained. This fork tracks fanategorius/occweb, which picked up compatibility maintenance where Adphi left off, and adds SQL query mode, security hardening (admin checks, CSRF/confirmation flows, transactional batches), and PHP 8.1+ compatibility fixes on top.

Credits

• Adphi/occweb — original author/project.
• fanategorius/occweb — the actively maintained fork this repo is based on and tracks.
• Git-Usr123/occweb — independent fork; the OC::$server->getConfig() → OC::$server->get(\OCP\IConfig::class) fix in OccController.php was spotted there and backported here.

This tool is still not the right place for big/risky operations. It has no support for asynchronous or long-running tasks — every command runs synchronously inside a single PHP web request, so anything that takes a while (occ files:scan on a large instance, a Nextcloud major-version occ upgrade, occ maintenance:mode --on workflows) can time out mid-operation with no way to recover cleanly. Use a real shell (SSH + occ directly, or the guest-agent/ console) for major upgrades and other long-running or high-blast-radius operations; reserve this terminal for routine day-to-day occ/SQL admin tasks. This issue has background on why Nextcloud has no native async support for occ tasks.

Install

Running Nextcloud AIO (Docker)? See INSTALL-AIO.md instead — the app path and deploy steps differ from the generic instructions below.

No build step required (plain PHP + vanilla JS). Clone straight into the target server's apps/ directory and run the install script:

cd /var/www/nextcloud/apps
git clone https://github.com/fanategorius/occweb.git
bash occweb/install.sh

install.sh removes the dev/CI-only files that don't belong in a running install (tests/, .travis.yml, phpunit*.xml, composer.json, composer.lock, Makefile), chown -Rs the app directory to the web server user, and runs occ app:enable. It assumes Nextcloud lives at /var/www/nextcloud and the web server user is www-data; pass different values as arguments if that's not the case:

bash occweb/install.sh /path/to/nextcloud custom-web-user

occ app:enable takes care of registering the app's version correctly, so none of the "Deploying updates" caveats below apply to a fresh install — they only matter once the app is already enabled and you're updating it in place.

Before installing, check your Nextcloud version against the range in appinfo/info.xml (dependencies/nextcloud, currently min-version/ max-version) — occ app:enable refuses to enable an app outside that range.

Note: install.sh deletes files that are tracked in git. If you plan to keep this install up to date with git pull instead of re-cloning, be aware that a future upstream change to one of the removed files could make a plain git pull refuse to merge — it will tell you so, and you can git checkout -- <file> to recover it if that happens.

SQL query mode

Type sql in the terminal to switch into SQL query mode and run raw SQL statements directly against the Nextcloud database (admin only). Separate statements with ;. Use Shift+Enter to add a new line and Enter to run the whole block in a single request — this matters for scripts like SET vars.x = 'value'; SELECT current_setting('vars.x');, since every statement in one submission runs on the same database connection/session. Type occ to switch back to the normal occ-command mode.

⚠️ There is no undo for DELETE/UPDATE statements — double check what you are about to run, ideally against a non-critical row/user first.

⚠️ Warnings ⚠️

• The application is not a real interactive terminal and does not support long running tasks. So if your instance is pretty big, commands like occ files:scan will time out and fail.
• Do not use occ maintenance:mode --on, obvious...
• The rename-user SQL template is best-effort only: renaming a Nextcloud username is not an officially supported operation. It updates the core tables it knows about (oc_users, oc_preferences, oc_group_user, oc_group_admin, oc_ldap_user_mapping, oc_share, oc_mounts, oc_storages), but does not touch app-specific tables (Talk, Calendar, Contacts, Mail, two-factor/WebAuthn, etc.). You must also manually rename the user's data directory on disk (data/<old> -> data/<new>) with the web server stopped or in maintenance mode, then run occ files:scan --all. Back up the database first and test on a non-critical account.

Deploying updates

After pulling/copying new code into nextcloud/apps/occweb/, restart PHP so the changes actually take effect. occ app:disable/app:enable is not enough — it does not clear PHP's opcode cache, so a stale, cached version of the code can keep running (routes silently 404ing is a typical symptom). Restart the PHP process itself, for example:

sudo systemctl restart php8.3-fpm   # adjust to your installed PHP version
sudo systemctl restart apache2      # if PHP runs as an Apache module instead

If you bump the <version> in appinfo/info.xml

Nextcloud tracks each app's installed version in its database (installed_version in oc_appconfig) separately from the <version> in info.xml. If you edit files in place (copy/git pull) instead of going through the app store or occ upgrade, those two get out of sync — Nextcloud then treats the whole instance as "needs upgrade" and blocks most occ commands behind the CLI-upgrade wizard, even though nothing about Nextcloud core actually changed. After bumping the version, sync it manually:

sudo -u www-data php /var/www/nextcloud/occ config:app:set occweb installed_version --value="X.Y.Z"

(use the same X.Y.Z as the new <version>), then restart PHP as above. This does not apply on a fresh occ app:enable install — that command sets installed_version correctly on its own.

TODOs:

See open issues