Chapter 8. Patching and Upgrading Red Hat JBoss BPM Suite

Red Hat JBoss BPM Suite patches can be either an asynchronous update, or a planned update:

To download Red Hat JBoss BPM Suite patches:

The following files are included as part of a Red Hat JBoss BRMS and Red Hat JBoss BPM Suite patch release.

In Red Hat JBoss BPM Suite, the client patching tool is distributed as a ZIP file that includes .sh and .bat scripts, allowing for easy and automatic application of updates to an existing Red Hat JBoss BPM Suite 6.1 (or better) installation.

The script requires two mandatory parameters: <path-to-distribution-root> and <type-of-distribution>. For example, the following command applies the updates to the specified Red Hat JBoss EAP 6.4 bundle:

$ ./apply-updates.sh ~/EAP_HOME/jboss-eap-6.4 eap6.x

The following command applies the updates to the specified Red Hat JBoss EAP 7.0 bundle:

$ ./apply-updates.sh ~/EAP_HOME/jboss-eap-7.0 eap7.x

The following distribution types are supported:

The quickstarts and migration tool are also included in the patch and are available for download as a ZIP file.

Backup Feature

Before applying any updates, the client script takes a backup of the specified distribution. It copies the distribution file or directory into the backup/CURRENT_TIMESTAMP subdirectory. The top-level backup directory is created at the same filesystem level as the apply-updates script.

Blacklist Feature

The client patching tool provides a blacklist feature that allows you to tell the script the files that must not be updated. This is a feature that helps you preserve your configuration files from being overwritten automatically by the update process. You can specify non-configuration files as well if required.

To specify the blacklisted files, open the file blacklist.txt present within the patch distribution. Enter the relative path to the files that must not be updated. Each file must be specified on a line by itself.

# Lines with a '#' are comment lines, like this one.
# Blank lines are ignored.

# We have made changes to the web.xml that must be preserved:
WEB-INF/web.xml

# This file has custom modifications:
styles/base.css

Files specified in the blacklist.txt file that have updated content in the patch, are not touched by the update tool. Instead, the tool copies the new, updated file in the same location and appends the new suffix to it. For example, after running the patch tool, both these files will exist in the styles folder, continuing with the blacklist.txt file in the example above.

$ ls styles
base.css base.css.new

Now, compare the contents of the two files and merge the changes.

If there are files that are no longer being distributed but you want to preserve them, put them into the blacklist.txt file as well. The patch update tool will not delete these files, and instead create an empty marker file with the suffix removed. You can then choose to either keep or delete these files manually.

Continuing with the previous example, if the base.css file was removed and you had this file listed in the blacklist.txt file, then after the patch tool has run, the contents of the styles directory would be similar to:

$ ls styles
base.css base.css.removed

Use the following commands for updating other supported platforms and common applications in Red Hat JBoss BPM Suite.

$ ./apply-updates.sh PATH/jboss-eap-6.4/standalone/deployments/business-central.war eap6.x-bc

$ ./apply-updates.sh PATH/jboss-eap-7.0/standalone/deployments/business-central.war eap7.x-bc

$ ./apply-updates.sh PATH/jboss-eap-6.4/standalone/deployments/kie-server.war eap6.x-kie-server

$ ./apply-updates.sh PATH/jboss-eap-7.0/standalone/deployments/kie-server.war eap7.x-kie-server

$ ./apply-updates.sh PATH_TO_TOMCAT_HOME/webapps/kie-server.war generic-kie-server

$ ./apply-updates.sh PATH_TO_UNZIPPED_wlsc12c_BUNDLE wls12c

$ ./apply-updates.sh PATH_TO_UNZIPPED_PLANNER_BUNDLE planner-engine

$ ./apply-updates.sh PATH_TO_UNZIPPED_WAS_BUNDLE was8

See Section 8.2, “Applying Patches in Red Hat JBoss BPM Suite 6.4” and Section 8.4, “Upgrading to Latest Minor Release” for more information.

Apart from supporting upgrade to the latest micro release, Red Hat JBoss BPM Suite also supports upgrading between minor releases. For example, upgrading from:

The Red Hat JBoss BPM Suite upgrade tool is distributed as ZIP files with naming convention that states the upgrade path. For example, jboss-bpmsuite-6.2.2-to-6.3.0-patch.zip is used to upgrade from 6.2.x to the 6.3.0 version. These ZIP files can be downloaded from the Red Hat Customer Portal:

Each ZIP file contains the following scripts:

To upgrade to the next minor release using these upgrade scripts, you must specify arguments indicating the path of distribution and the type of distribution you want to upgrade in your command:

$ ./apply-updates.sh DISTRIBUTION_PATH DISTRIBUTION_NAME

For example:

$ ./apply-updates.sh ~/EAP_HOME/jboss-eap-6.4 eap6.x

The supported distribution types are:

The upgrade tool allows you to upgrade the entire distribution, or only a part of the distribution as per your requirement. For example, for the eap6.x distribution, you can choose to patch the entire eap6.x or choose to patch any of the war files (eap6.x-bc, eap6.x-dashbuilder, eap6.x-kie-server) that the patch contains.

Note that the upgrade tool does not upgrade the configuration files if you have your custom updates in them. The upgrade tool checks if the configuration files have any changes. If there are no changes made to the configuration files, the tool replaces the configuration files with the latest version. However, if the tool finds custom changes made to any of the configuration files, it adds those files to blacklist, and does not replace them with the latest version. So you do not need to manually compare the configuration files and place them in the blacklist to ensure that your custom configurations are intact.