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Upgrade Community Edition

Use this information to upgrade from a version of Community Edition to a later version, apply a Service Pack, or upgrade the search subsystem.

Before performing an upgrade or applying a Service Pack, make sure you check the recommended upgrade path and the prerequisites checklist. As a part of upgrade, you need to validate and test to ensure that the Alfresco upgrade was successful.

Care should be taken when upgrading from any previous releases of Community Edition. There are some steps that should be reviewed and planned before you upgrade. Familiarize yourself with the guidance below and then plan your upgrade. In particular, ensure that the following steps are completed before you start:

  • Ensure that you have a functional backup of your Alfresco repository and database, before starting the upgrade process.
  • Download and run the Alfresco Extension Inspector to understand which customization or library items need to be reviewed or updated to support the upgrade.
  • Review all new and deprecated features included in the Community Release Notes.
  • Review and implement the new supported stack options, and update as necessary for the new deployment.

Upgrade process

Use this procedure to upgrade from a previous version of Community Edition using one of the supported installation methods. The process involves a new installation of the Community Edition binaries and configuration, and an in-place upgrade of a copy of the repository.

In-place upgrade of the binaries and configuration isn’t recommended. Creating a new installation ensures that if anything goes wrong during the upgrade, the original (not upgraded) system is still intact and available for immediate restart.

These steps assume that you’ve got an existing Community Edition installation (alfresco-v.1) with the following settings:

File Name Properties
alfresco-global.properties dir.root=/alfresco-v.1/alf_data

db.url=url<v.1>
solrcore.properties data.dir.root=/alfresco-v.1/solr/myindexes
  1. Install the new version of Community Edition.

    1. Shut down your existing instance.

    2. Back up your existing repository (alfresco-v.1) and the database.

      Note: Back up any configuration overrides from the <extension> directory.

    3. Install the new version (alfresco-v.2) into a different directory from the existing installation.

      For example, the new Alfresco installation will have the following settings:

      In alfresco-global.properties:

       dir.root=/alfresco-v.2/alf_data
       db.url=url<v.2>
      

      In solrcore.properties:

       data.dir.root:/alfresco-v.2/solr/myindexes
      
  2. Validate the new installation to check that it’s working correctly.

    1. Configure the new installation with a new repository and database (not the existing one).

    2. Start the server and validate that the system works correctly.

  3. Apply all customizations to the new installation.

    1. Stop the server.

    2. Remove any unwanted applications.

    3. Modify applications.

    4. Install the required AMP files. See Installing an Alfresco Module Package.

    5. Don’t copy the files. Copy only the override settings, so that you won’t overwrite the new extension files in the upgraded version.

    6. Start the server.

      Monitor the startup log messages for information on the status of the upgrade. If any issues occur in the logs during startup, you’ll need to rollback the whole repository to fix the issue and then try again.

    7. Fully test your customizations and configuration.

    8. Stop the server.

  4. Restore production data.

    1. Remove all the files and directories under the contentstore directory of the new installation. Also, delete the database.

    2. Delete the files in the two Solr alfrescoModels directories, and the indexes in the two directories (solr/workspace/ and solr/archive/) of the new installation.

    3. Restore the backup of the indexes, contentstore directory, files, and database from your previous installation into the new installation.

    4. Start the server.

      If any issue(s) occur in the logs during startup, you need to rollback the whole repository to fix the issue(s) and then try again.

  5. If you’re happy with the upgraded system, remove the old installation and repository.

Validate upgrade

Once you’ve upgraded, follow these steps to validate the new installation.

  1. Restart the Community Edition server.

    The configuration overrides ensure the server immediately directs data to the appropriate locations.

  2. Monitor the startup log messages for information on the status of the upgrade.

  3. Validate the new installation using a blank repository.

  4. Configure the new installation with a new repository (not the existing one).

  5. Verify the database connection details and data folder locations are set according to the environment in which the server is running.

  6. Start Community Edition and validate the system works correctly.

  7. Shut down Community Edition.

  8. When you are certain the new installation is thoroughly validated, remove the old installation and repository.

Apply optional performance database patch

Note. This patch can take hours to run on larger systems.

Content Services 7.0 contains a recommended database patch, which adds two indexes to the alf_node table and three to alf_transaction. This patch is optional, but recommended for larger implementations as it can have a big positive performance impact. These indexes are not automatically applied during upgrade, as the amount of time needed to create them might be considerable. They should be run manually after the upgrade process completes.

To apply the patch, an admin should set the following Alfresco global property to true:

system.new-node-transaction-indexes.ignored=false

Like other patches, it will only be run once so there’s no need to reset the property afterwards.

Until this step is completed, you will see Schema Validation warnings reported in the alfresco.log on each startup. The log will also indicate that the patch was not run:

INFO  [org.alfresco.repo.domain.schema.SchemaBootstrap] [...] Ignoring script patch (post-Hibernate): patch.db-V6.3-add-indexes-node-transaction
...
WARN  [org.alfresco.repo.domain.schema.SchemaBootstrap] [...] Schema validation found ... potential problems, results written to ...

Log4j2 migration guide

In Content Services 7.4, log4j has been replaced with log4j2. See the Log4j2 migration guide for more information in the Enterprise documentation.

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