Upgrade Guide

Upgrading Openfire is almost as easy as installing Openfire from scratch. As part of the upgrade process it is highly recommended to backup your current installation and database. Having backups will let you easily rollback to a previous state and ensure that you have not lost vital information. The rest of the document describes the common steps to perform a successful upgrade. The new version of Openfire will be installed over the existing version and all settings and data will be retained.

Standard Upgrade

Windows EXE

Stop Openfire (when using a service, stop it manually).
Backup the Openfire installation directory. The default is _C:\Program Files\Openfire_
Backup the Openfire database. Note that the embedded database is backed up in step 2.
Run the installer for the new version of Openfire (note that the installer MUST point to the base installation directory of the previous version).
Complete the installer process.
Start Openfire (when using a service, start it manually).

RPM - RedHat based unix systems (RHEL, CentOS, Fedora, etc)

Stop Openfire.
Backup the Openfire installation directory.
Backup the Openfire database. Note that the embedded database is backed up in step 2.
Install the new RPM. Execute rpm -Uvf openfire-3.3.3-1.i386.rpm to update your current install
Start Openfire.

Remember that the server can be started in manual or automatic mode. Execute /opt/openfire/bin/openfire.sh to start in manual mode or execute /etc/init.d/openfire start to start the server as a service. Execute /etc/init.d/openfire stop to stop the server's service.

Things to note

The new RPM installs Openfire as a service. That means that the server will be started when the OS is started and the server is stopped upon shutdown.
/opt/openfire/bin/openfire no longer exists. It was a start/stop script generated by install4j. Since we are no longer using install4j, it needed to go. Instead, we now have a more standard linux init script, /etc/init.d/openfire.
/etc/sysconfig/openfire can now be used to 'tweak' things, like paths and such. See the file for more information.
The entire directory tree is owned by daemon now. We ditched the need for a new user and are sticking with a standard unix system account. The RPM will take care of owning everything as you install it.
Beyond having /etc/init.d/openfire to stop and start openfire, it has chkconfig compatible tags in it and is automatically added via the rpm so that openfire should start up as your server starts up.
The RPM will no longer overwrite: conf/openfire.xml, resources/security/keystore or resources/security/truststore.

Mac OS X DMG

Stop Openfire.
Backup the Openfire installation directory. The default is _/usr/local/wildfire_.
Backup the Openfire database. Note that the embedded database is backed up in step 2.
Open the installer for the new version of Openfire.
Complete the installer process.

ZIP or TAR.GZ

Stop Openfire.
Backup the Openfire installation directory. This step is critical because the data will be overwritten with the new .tar.gz install.
Backup the Openfire database. Note that the embedded database is backed up in step 2.
Install the .tar.gz file (extract it over the current directory).
Copy the conf directory from the backup to the installation directory.
Copy the embedded-db directory from the backup to the installation directory.
Copy the enterprise directory from the backup to the installation directory, if it exists.
Copy the plugins directory from the backup to the installation directory except for _plugins/admin_.
Copy modified files located in resources/security from the backup to the installation directory.
Start Openfire

Special Upgrade cases

There are some special occasions where some manual intervention is needed while performing the upgrade process. This is usually the case when some mayor refactoring work was done that requires complex upgrade operations. However, this is not a common case in Openfire (e.g. this happened twice since 2003). Below you will find the upgrade steps to follow for these special occasions: