TechNote (Archived)

Upgrading from ColdFusion MX 6.x to ColdFusion MX 7.x

Issue

In order to properly upgrade from ColdFusion MX 6.x to ColdFusion MX 7.x and retain all settings, proper steps must be taken. Doing otherwise may cause the software to function incorrectly or loss of the settings from the previous version.

Reason

Uninstalling ColdFusion MX 6.x deletes thewebroot/CFIDE and webroot/cfdocs directories. If you uninstall ColdFusion MX 6.x after installing ColdFusion MX 7, this will likely break the MX 7.x installation.

Solution

In order to properly execute the upgrade from ColdFusion MX 6.x to ColdFusion MX 7.x, follow the steps below:

Launch the ColdFusion MX 7.x installation file.
During the installation, when asked to select a main installation directory, leave the default directory there. On Windows, it will look like C:/CFusionMX7. On UNIX/Linux/Solaris, it will be similar to /opt/coldfusionmx7/. Keep in mind that your ColdFusion MX 7.x installation must have a different home directory than your ColdFusion MX 6.x installation. Leaving the default one there lets you accomplish just that. If for any reason you need to change it, please change it to a directory that is different from your ColdFusion MX 6.x installation.
Proceed with the installation until it's complete, configuring ColdFusion to run with your external web server.
When done with the installation, launch the ColdFusion MX 7 Administrator. Do not uninstall ColdFusion MX 6.x yet.
The ColdFusion MX 7 Administrator will recognize the previous ColdFusion version installed and will ask whether or not to keep all the settings from the previous version. If the answer is 'yes', it then migrates all your settings, such as data sources, scheduled tasks and other settings from ColdFusion MX 6.x. When the process is completed, you will be redirected to the actual ColdFusion MX 7 Administrator page.
Close the browser with the ColdFusion MX 7 Administrator and then navigate to your web server's home directory in your file system. Usually these two directories are located under your web server home directory such as webroot/wwwroot (IIS) orwebroot/htdocs (Apache). Rename them to something else, for example CFIDE7 and cfdocs7.
It is now safe to uninstall ColdFusion MX 6.x.
Once ColdFusion MX 6.x is uninstalled, go back to the renamed CFIDE and cfdocs folders and rename them back to their original names.
Launch the ColdFusion MX 7 Administrator to make sure that everything works.

Additional Information

Please note that you will still need to manually recreate and reindex all Verity collections that existed in ColdFusion MX 6.x, as they will not be migrated to ColdFusion MX 7.