How to upgrade from Railo 3.* to Railo 4

Posted by Paul Klinkenberg in CFML , Railo on November 28, 2012

Upgrading your existing Railo 3 installation to Railo 4 is really easy! No need to re-install Railo or anything, just copy-paste some jar files...

Step 1: download the JAR files from getrailo.org

Just go to http://www.getrailo.org/index.cfm/download/, scroll down to "Railo custom", and click on "JAR files". At the time of writing, the jar files for Railo version 4.0.0.013 are available there.

Step 2: stop your servlet engine ("Railo")

On Windows, you should probably go to your Services panel, and locate "Railo server ..." or "Apache Tomcat Railo ...". Stop the service.

Otherwise, execute the stop script at {tomcat-root}/tomcat/bin/shutdown.sh (shutdown.bat), or {railo-express}/stop.sh (stop.bat?).

Step 3: copy the downloaded jar files

Unzip the jar files you downloaded, and add them to {tomcat-root}/lib, or {railo-express}/lib/ext/. You will overwrite some of the existing jar files, that's no problem.

Step 4: remove some of the jar files (Railo 4 beta only I assume)

Locate and delete the 3 jar files ehcache.jar, railo-sl4j.jar, and sl4j-api.jar. inside the folder where you just added the jar files. Otherwise you'll get an error message about not being able to delete the respective jar files when trying to update at step 5.

Step 5: restart the servlet engine

Just like step 2, but replace "stop"/"shutdown" with "start" ;-)

Step 6: update to latest "bleeding edge" version

Go to your Railo server admin, typically located at http://localhost:8080/railo-context/admin/server.cfm or http://localhost:8888/railo-context/admin/server.cfm
Go to the menu item Services > Update.
Click on the radio button next to "Development releases (Bleeding Edge)", and hit the Update button.
Now scroll down in that page, to see if there are updates available. If so, hit the "execute update" button.

Note: if the admin page comes back really quick after you hit the "execute update" button, then check the top of the page for any error messages.

Warnings

Railo 4 is still in beta status (november 2012). Especially when you use the "bleeding edge" versions, you have a fair chance of encountering bugs and/or errors. If you are using Railo on your production systems, I would suggest to wait for the official Railo 4 release.

If you do encounter any bugs, then please create a ticket for it in the Railo JIRA ticketing system (search first, to see if the bug already is in there), or send a message to the Railo mailinglist.