OpenDJ 2.4.0 was released a couple of months ago, and we’re seeing a lot of interest for it, especially from people who’ve already been evaluating OpenDS.

It is possible, and very easy, to upgrade from OpenDS 2.x to the latest version of OpenDJ. Here’s the easiest and more error-proof way.

First start by downloading the latest version of OpenDJ from ForgeRock web site. Currently the most recent release is OpenDJ 2.4.0, but nightly builds of coming OpenDJ 2.5.0 are also available. While you can run the upgrade through the Java web start installer, I recommend that you download the Zip package and run the upgrade from the command line.

Download and/or copy the OpenDJ zip package on the machine which has the instance to upgrade. Do not unzip it.

Go in the directory of the instance to upgrade:

cd /local/OpenDS2.2/

From that place, run the OpenDS 2.2 upgrade command :

./upgrade

The first question you’re asked is to confirm you plan to do an upgrade, so press the <Enter> key

The provide the full absolute path to the OpenDJ zip package, for example : /tmp/OpenDJ-2.4.0.zip

And then continue with the Upgrade program.

Should some customization of the schema or the configuration failing to be upgraded, the Upgrade program will stop and ask you what you want to do. You can review the details and decide to abort or continue the upgrade.

If you’re not sure about what to do, please consider continuing the upgrade. All files and customizations are preserved under the history directory and you can review them and decide if you want to try to reconfigure or not the upgraded server.

And do not forget to rebuild the dn2id index after the upgrade, as there’s been a change of format in this system index, to correct a defect and improve space efficiency.  To do so, stop the upgraded server and run the rebuild-index command :

bin/rebuild-index <some options> -i dn2id -b "<suffix>"

If you have a replicated environment, you can upgrade all the servers, one after the other, without interrupting the service nor changing anything in the replication configuration. The upgrade of a single server should take less than 5 minutes.

Prior to running an upgrade, we recommend you take a full backup of the server. A quick way to do this with small databases, is to stop the server and just fully copy it to another location. You can run the upgrade and then move back the copy in place if something didn’t run as expected.

Enjoy.

Update on Feb 27: Mention the need to rebuild the dn2id index. This was described in the 2.4.0 release notes, but was missing here.

Update on June 3: When upgrading to OpenDJ 2.4.2 or later, it is necessary to run a simple script against the OpenDS or OpenDJ instances before running the upgrade command. This script is patching a file used for the upgrade to detect schema changes. More details are available in the OpenDJ 2.4.2 Installation Guide.