Performing an In-Place Upgrade

Last update: April 24, 2024

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NOTE
This page outlines the upgrade procedure for AEM 6.5. If you have an installation that is deployed to an application server, see Upgrade Steps for Application Server Installations.

Pre-Upgrade Steps

Before executing your upgrade, there are several steps that must be completed. See Upgrading Code and Customizations and Pre-Upgrade Maintenance Tasks for more information. Additionally, make sure that your system meets the requirements for the new version of AEM. See how Pattern Detector can help you estimate the complexity of your upgarde and also see the Upgrade Scope and Requirements section of Planning Your Upgrade for more information.

Migration Prerequisites

  • Minimum Required Java version: The migration tool only works with Java versions 7 and up. Note that for AEM 6.3 and up, Oracle’s JRE 8 and IBM’s JRE 7 & 8 are the only supported versions.

  • Upgraded Instance: If you are upgrading from a version older than 5.6, make sure that you have performed an in-place upgrade to AEM 6.0 by following the procedure described in the 6.0 version of the Upgrade documentation.

Preparation of the AEM Quickstart jar file

  1. Stop the instance if it is running.

  2. Download the new AEM jar file and use it to replace the old one outside the crx-quickstart folder.

  3. Unpack the new quickstart jar by running:

    java -Xmx4096m -jar aem-quickstart.jar -unpack

Content Repository Migration

This migration is not required if you are upgrading from AEM 6.3. For versions older than 6.3, Adobe provides a tool that can be used to migrate the repository to the new version of the Oak Segment Tar present in AEM 6.3. It is provided as part of the quickstart package and is mandatory for any upgrades that will be using TarMK. Upgrades for environments that are using MongoMK do not require repository migration. For more information on what the benefits of the new Segment Tar format are, see the Migrating to Oak Segment Tar FAQ.

The actual migration is performed using the standard AEM quickstart jar file, executed with a new -x crx2oak option which executes the crx2oak tool to simplify the upgrade and make it more robust.

NOTE
If you are performing TarMK repository content migration using the CRX2Oak Quickstart extension, you might remove the samplecontent runmode by adding the following to the migration command line:
  • --promote-runmode nosamplecontent

To determine the command that you should run, use the following command:

java -Xmx4096m -jar aem-quickstart.jar -v -x crx2oak -xargs -- --load-profile <<YOUR_PROFILE>> <<ADDITIONAL_FLAGS>>

Where <<YOUR_PROFILE>> and <<ADDITIONAL_FLAGS>> are replaced with the profile and flags listed in the following table:

Source RepositoryTarget RepositoryProfileAdditional Flags
crx2 or TarMK with FileDataStoreTarMKsegment-fdsSee Troubleshooting section below
crx2MongoMKmongo-from-crx2-T mongo-uri=mongo://mongo-host:mongo-port -T mongo-db=mongo-database-name
TarMK or crx2 with S3DataStoreTarMKsegment-custom-dsSee Troubleshooting section below
TarMK with no datastoreTarMKsegment-no-ds
MongoMKMongoMKNo migration is needed

Where:

  • mongo-host is the MongoDB server IP (for example, 127.0.0.1)

  • mongo-port is the MongoDB server port (for example: 27017)

  • mongo-database-name represents the name of the database (for example: aem-author)

You may also require additional switches for the following scenarios:

  • If you are performing the upgrade on a Windows system where Java memory mapping is not handled correctly, add the --disable-mmap parameter to the command.

For additional instructions on using the crx2oak tool, see Using the CRX2Oak Migration Tool. The crx2oak helper JAR can be manually upgraded if needed, by manually replacing it with newer versions after unpacking the quickstart. Its location in the AEM installation folder is: <aem-install>/crx-quickstart/opt/extensions/crx2oak.jar. The newest version of the CRX2Oak migration tool is available for download from the Adobe Repository at: https://repo1.maven.org/maven2/com/adobe/granite/crx2oak/

If the migration has completed successfully, the tool will exit with an exit code of zero. Additionally, check for WARN and ERROR messages in the upgrade.log file, located under crx-quickstart/logs in the AEM installation directory, as these could indicate non-fatal errors that occurred during the migration.

Check the configuration files beneath crx-quickstart/install folder. If a migration was necessary these will be updated to reflect the target repository.

A note on datastores:

While FileDataStore is the new default for AEM 6.3 installations, using an external datastore is not required. While using an external datastore is recommended as a best practice for production deployments, it is not a prerequisite to upgrade. Due to the complexity already present in upgrading AEM, Adobe recommends performing the upgrade without doing a datastore migration. If desired, a datastore migration can be executed afterwards as a separate effort.

Troubleshooting Migration Issues

Skip this section if you are upgrading from 6.3. While the provided crx2oak profiles should meet the needs of most customers, there are times when additional parameters will be necessary. If you run into an error during your migration, it is possible that there are aspects of your environment that require additional configuration options to be provided. If so, you will likely encounter the following error:

Checkpoints are not copied, because no external datastore has been specified. This will result in the full repository reindexing on the first start. Use --skip-checkpoints to force the migration or see https://jackrabbit.apache.org/oak/docs/migration.html#Checkpoints_migration for more info.

For some reason, the migration process needs access to binaries in the datastore and is unable to find it. To specify your datastore configuration, include the following flags in the <<ADDITIONAL_FLAGS>> portion of your migration command:

For S3 datastores:

--src-s3config=/path/to/SharedS3DataStore.config --src-s3datastore=/path/to/datastore

Where /path/to/SharedS3DataStore.config represents the path to your S3 datastore config file and /path/to/datastore represents the path to your S3 datastore.

For File datastores:

--src-datastore=/path/to/datastore

Where /path/to/datastore represents the path to your File Datastore.

Performing The Upgrade

If using S3:

  1. Remove any jars beneath crx-quickstart/install associated with an earlier version of the S3 connector.

  2. Download the latest release of the 1.10.x S3 connector from https://repo1.maven.org/maven2/com/adobe/granite/com.adobe.granite.oak.s3connector/

  3. Extract the package to a temporary folder and copy the contents of jcr_root/libs/system/install to the crx-quickstart/install folder.

Determining the correct upgrade start command

To execute the upgrade, it is important to start AEM using the jar file to bring up the instance. For upgrading to 6.5, see other content restructuring and migration options in Lazy Content Migration that you can choose with the upgrade command.

IMPORTANT
If you are running Oracle Java 11 (or generally versions of Java newer than 8), additional switches must be added to your command line when starting AEM. For more information, see Java 11 Considerations.

Note that starting AEM from the start script will not start the upgrade. Most customers start AEM using the start script and have customized this start script to include switches for environment configurations such as memory settings, security certificates, and so on. For this reason, Adobe recommends following this procedure to determine the proper upgrade command:

  1. On a running AEM instance, execute the following from the command line:

    ps -ef | grep java

  2. Look for the AEM process. It will look something like:

    /usr/bin/java -server -Xmx1024m -Djava.awt.headless=true -Dsling.run.modes=author,crx3,crx3tar -jar crx-quickstart/app/cq-quickstart-6.5.0-standalone-quickstart.jar start -c crx-quickstart -i launchpad -p 4502 -Dsling.properties=conf/sling.properties

  3. Modify the command by replacing the path to the existing jar ( crx-quickstart/app/aem-quickstart*.jar in this case) with the new jar that is a sibling of the crx-quickstart folder. Using our previous command as an example, our command would be:

    /usr/bin/java -server -Xmx1024m -Djava.awt.headless=true -Dsling.run.modes=author,crx3,crx3tar -jar cq-quickstart-6.5.0.jar -c crx-quickstart -p 4502 -Dsling.properties=conf/sling.properties

    This will ensure that all proper memory settings, custom runmodes, and other environmental parameters are applied for the upgrade. After the upgrade has completed, the instance may be started from the start script on future startups.

Deploy Upgraded Codebase

Once the in-place upgrade process has been completed, the updated code base should be deployed. Steps for updating the code base to work in the target version of AEM can be found in Upgrade Code and Customizations page.

Perform Post-Upgrade Checks and Troubleshooting

See Post Upgrade Checks and Troubleshooting.

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