nextcloud-inotifyscan

Automatically scan changes for Nextcloud external storage.

Motivation

Nextcloud uses a database to keep track of the files it stores. However, if a file is externally modified, the database won't know. It seems that the only possible way to inform the database is to run occ files:scan, which can be time- and resource-consuming if the whole storage is periodically scanned.

This Python script uses inotifywait to watch for changes and issues scan requests for the modified part on demand.

Requirements

• Linux with systemd
• Nextcloud installation
• php and inotifywait in PATH
• /usr/bin/python

The script should work if modified for other environments.

Usage

1. Download nextcloud-inotifyscan as /usr/local/bin/nextcloud-inotifyscan
2. sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/nextcloud-inotifyscan
3. Download nextcloud-inotifyscan.service as /etc/systemd/system/nextcloud-inotifyscan.service
4. Modify NEXTCLOUD_HOME and USER_NAME in /etc/systemd/system/nextcloud-inotifyscan.service
5. sudo systemctl enable --now nextcloud-inotifyscan

Notes

• This script is tested on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS and Ubuntu 18.04 LTS
  • To install inotifywait on Ubuntu, use sudo apt install inotify-tools
• This script ignores hidden files (inotifywait --exclude '/\.'), as Nextcloud does
• A similar project implemented in php, files_inotify, doesn't seem to work at this point in time exists but I'm not sure if it works
• Watching ~2000 directories with ~30000 files, inotifywait consumes less than 4MB memory (RES+SHR)
• To watch more than 8192 directories, fs.inotify.max_user_watches may need to be increased via sysctl
• Nextcloud 14 or a later version is required for the --shallow flag