BackgroundJobs not running on nextcloud 17.2

Here is the relevant section of nextcloud documentation. I executed the these commands in the nextcloud container which solved the problem. Note, there was no crontab entry for www-data which was the root cause.

Cron

Using the operating system cron feature is the preferred method for executing regular tasks. This method enables the execution of scheduled jobs without the inherent limitations the Web server might have.

To run a cron job on a *nix system, every 5 minutes, under the default Web server user (often, www-data or wwwrun), you must set up the following cron job to call the cron.php script:

# crontab -u www-data -e

And append this line:

*/5  *  *  *  * php -f /var/www/nextcloud/cron.php

You can verify if the cron job has been added and scheduled by executing:

# crontab -u www-data -l

Which returns:

[snip]
*/5  *  *  *  * php -f /var/www/nextcloud/cron.php

Hi Ken. My deepest apologies for such a slow response. I'm currently bogged down with our new major upcoming release (v18.0) but trying to get back on top of the forums. Anyway...

Thanks for posting with your issue and bonus points for posting back with a fix.

Having said that, it is a known issue (FWIW, each appliance has a link to their specific known issues on each appliance page). And as noted on the issue, it's not that we don't provide a cron job, it's that the path to run is wrong (we set it up as a global cron job, rather than a user cron job, but they serve the same purpose).

The issue has been fixed in the build code, but unfortunately, it only came to my attention just after I had done the most recent (v17.2) Nextcloud release. It was slated for inclusion in a v17.3 release, and in a perfect world, I would have rebuilt it immediately, but we're a small team with a lot of plates spinning and saying yes to one thing always means saying no to a million others. So it'll need to wait until we release our v18.0 build. Hopefully that won't be more than a month or 2 away.

FWIW, once we have v18.0 done, I plan to turn my attention to some automation in our build processes. Whilst it will take a little bit of setting up, we have most of the pieces in place now, so hopefully that will both free me up a bit for other things (more new appliances perhaps?), plus make rebuilding apps quicker and easier.