With the release of ColdFusion 10 came one new feature WE ALL have been asking Adobe to implement. This feature is the Hotfix installer and notifications. This is in the ColdFusion 10 Administrator under "Server Update" at the bottom of the left hand navigation menu. Yesterday I saw Adobe had released an update to ColdFusion 10. So today I decided to test the new Hotfix Installer. After launching my ColdFusion 10 Administrator I immediately saw in the upper right-hand corner and alert notifying me there was an update ready to download and install. So how does the installer work? During the alpha and beta testing with Adobe I never had a chance to test this feature. None of the alpha or beta updates were released in a way that could use the hot fix installer. So today is the first test I've ever done of Hotfix Installer.
First make sure you are administering the main instance of ColdFusion 10, this is done by accessing the administration on port 8500. A url such as http://127.0.0.1:8500/CFIDE/administrator/index.cfm. You may have to enable this instance in your Windows Services.
So without reading any instructions I did the obvious, I clicked on the alert. This took me to the Updates section of the ColdFusion 10 Administrator that has a three tabbed pane; Available Updates, Installed Updates and Settings. In the Available Updates tab it stated which update was available for installation. And it gave me two options Download or Download and Install.
I chose to Download and Install. The next thing I was prompted with was a pop-up that asked me to which of my ColdFusion instances I wanted to update. I have ColdFusion 10 set up with multiple instances and it is important to apply updates to all of the instances.
The only slight flaw in the update process I saw was that while ColdFusion 10 was restarting the ColdFusion 10 Administrator didn't refresh or alert me somehow of the services had been restarted. After a few moments I refreshed the ColdFusion Administrator page and was prompted to login. After logging in I went back to the Updates section and the Installed Updates tab now shows that I have installed the update.
All in all the first test of installing a ColdFusion 10 Hotfix using the new Hotfix installer was a blazing success. I know that this will make my life much easier while administering ColdFusion servers at CF Webtools.
#1 by Wilgeno on 12/4/12 - 2:57 PM
1. There is a mandatory Hotfix update that must be installed OUTSIDE this updater. This fixed the SSL security certificate was was compromised at Adobe. For Windows the "manual" update has a nice GUI to walk you through the install.
2. Unfortunately Update 3 was a total failure and Adobe revoked it. This allowed us the ability to test the uninstall update feature. So I guess it was a positive thing after all?
3. Still make backups of your /coldfusion10 folder BEFORE running updates. Just incase something does not go as expected.