Activity app

The Activity app records and summarizes user-visible events across your Nextcloud instance and can notify users via the activity stream, email, and push notifications. It is shipped and enabled by default.

Note

The Activity app is designed for user notifications, not for compliance or auditing. Users can enable or disable activity tracking for their own account, so the activity stream is not a reliable audit trail. If you need a complete log of all actions on your instance, use the admin_audit app instead — see Logging.

../_images/activity-settings-admin.png — *The Activity admin settings page showing default notification preferences for new accounts.*

Configuring your Nextcloud for the Activity app

Enabling email notifications

To send activity notification emails, a working Email is required.

It is also recommended to configure the background job run mode to a system run mode (System Cron or systemd) as described in Background jobs. The Ajax and Webcron modes may delay or skip email delivery.

Admin settings

As an administrator, you can:

Enable or disable notification emails globally using the Enable notification emails checkbox in Settings > Administration > Activity.
Configure the default notification preferences for new accounts. Existing users keep their personal settings. The defaults apply to accounts created after the change.

Configuration reference

The following config.php options control Activity app behavior.

Option	Default	Description
`activity_expire_days`	`365`	Number of days to retain activity records. A daily background job deletes all activities older than this value. Minimum is `1` day.
`activity_use_cached_mountpoints`	`false`	When `true`, activities in team folders and external storages are generated for all users with access, not just the acting user. See Activities in Team Folders or External Storages for details and caveats.
`activity_expire_exclude_users`	`[]`	An array of user IDs whose activity records are never deleted by the expiration job. See Excluding users from activity expiration.

Activities in Team Folders or External Storages

By default, activities in team folders or external storages are only generated for the current user. This is due to the underlying logic of these storage backends. The config flag activity_use_cached_mountpoints makes activities work like in normal shares when set to true.

'activity_use_cached_mountpoints' => true,

Danger

If “Advanced Permissions” (ACLs) are enabled in a team folder, activities do not respect those permissions. As a result, users may see activity entries for files and directories they cannot access. This can leak sensitive information. See this issue for more information.

Warning

Users who previously had access to a team folder, share, or external storage can continue to see new activity entries in their stream and emails until they log in again after access is removed.

Note

Users who are newly added to a team folder, share, or external storage will not see new activity entries in their stream or emails until they log in again after access is granted.

Excluding users from activity expiration

For certain users, it might make sense to never expire their activity data, for example administrators. Set the config value activity_expire_exclude_users in your config.php:

'activity_expire_exclude_users' => [
  'admin',
  'group_admin',
  'second_admin'
]

For these users, their activity records will never be deleted from the database.

Better scheduling of activity emails

In certain scenarios it makes sense to send the activity emails more regularly. For example, you may want to send the hourly emails always at the full hour, daily emails before people start to work in the morning, and weekly emails on Monday morning.

A console command is available to trigger sending those emails. This allows you to set up custom cron jobs with specific timing instead of relying on the Nextcloud background job:

# crontab -u www-data -e
*  *  *  *    php -f /var/www/nextcloud/occ activity:send-mails hourly
7  *  *  *    php -f /var/www/nextcloud/occ activity:send-mails daily
7  *  *  MON  php -f /var/www/nextcloud/occ activity:send-mails weekly

If you want to manually send out all queued activity emails, you can run occ activity:send-mails without any argument.

Troubleshooting

Users are not receiving notification emails

Verify that email is configured correctly. Send a test email from Settings > Administration > Basic settings.
Check that Enable notification emails is turned on in Settings > Administration > Activity.
Verify that the user has email notifications enabled in their personal notification settings (Settings > Personal > Notifications).
Ensure the background job is running. If you use Cron, check that the system cron job is executing php -f /var/www/nextcloud/cron.php regularly.
Check the Nextcloud log (data/nextcloud.log) for mail-related errors.

Activities are missing for shared files or team folders

By default, activities in team folders and external storages are only generated for the acting user. See Activities in Team Folders or External Storages for how to enable activities for all users with access.

Database growing large due to activity data

The Activity app stores all events in the database. On instances with many users or high file turnover, this can lead to significant database growth. To manage this:

Set activity_expire_days to a lower value (e.g. 90 or 180) to automatically clean up older records.
Ensure the Nextcloud background job is running so that the daily expiration job executes.
To assess current database usage, check the size of the oc_activity and oc_activity_mq tables directly.