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.

../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 :doc:`email_configuration` 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 :doc:`background_jobs_configuration`. 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.

Configure the maximum number of activities fully displayed in notification emails using the mail_max_items setting. Activities beyond this limit are summarised as "and X more" at the bottom of the email. The default is 200 and the maximum allowed value is 1000. For example, to set it to 500:
```
occ config:app:set activity mail_max_items --value=500
```

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 :ref:`label-activities-groupfolders` for details and caveats.
activity_expire_exclude_users	[]	An array of user IDs whose activity records are never deleted by the expiration job. See :ref:`label-activities-exclude-users`.

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,

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
 0  *  *  *  *    php -f /var/www/nextcloud/occ activity:send-mails hourly
30  7  *  *  *    php -f /var/www/nextcloud/occ activity:send-mails daily
30  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 :ref:`label-activities-groupfolders` 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.

Emails are still being sent after disabling notification emails

The Enable notification emails toggle is checked when queuing new emails. The background job that actually delivers emails (MailQueueHandler) does not re-read the toggle before sending, so emails that were already in the queue when the toggle was turned off will still be delivered.

To stop those emails immediately, clear the oc_activity_mq table:

DELETE FROM oc_activity_mq;

After clearing the table, no further queued activity emails will be sent until new ones are queued (which requires the toggle to be re-enabled).