I hear this often: you just applied a CF update, and now there’s a problem. Maybe some feature or code is “suddenly failing”. Or worse, perhaps CF won’t even start.
“The update is broken!”, you may think, or “CF has a bug in that update!” you say, as you go to open a bug report.
But consider first a far more common explanation: there may have simply been an error during your execution of the update, and you may not even realize it!
Here’s good news: there is an “install” log for the update, which will tell you if there were indeed errors. It’s just not obvious where to look.
Background
I help people with this problem about every day, whether on CF help forums, in social media, or in my troubleshooting consulting. Note that what I have to say here is true for ALL updates since CF10, so 11, 2016, 2018, and so on.
So first, there are a couple of reasons why people may not even notice that the update even had an error, and so presume that some problem “must be a bug” in CF or “because of the update”. For one thing, the update mechanism may seem to work, so you presume all’s well.
Worse, when the update does finish–and assuming you CAN get to the CF Admin–the page about the “installed updates” points people to the hotffix_filelist.log, file which isn’t the “install” log! (Adobe, could you change that on the “installed updates” page, please?)
Finding the update install log
So again, what you REALLY want to look for is the “install log” for the update. After the update is finished–whether it worked or not–do the following 5 easy steps:
- Go to CF’s “hf-updates” folder
- For most people, that would be in CF’s
cfusion/hf-updatesfolder - If you have CF Enterprise or Developer edition and are using multiple instances, and you applied the update to a particular instance, you may need to look in CF’s
[instancename]/hf-updatesfolder instead
- For most people, that would be in CF’s
- Then go into the specific folder for the update you just applied
- For instance, in CF2018 update 3, that would be a folder named
hf-2018-00003-314033
- For instance, in CF2018 update 3, that would be a folder named
- In that folder, look for the “install log” file
- This will be a file with the date and time that you ran the update, such as
Adobe_ColdFusion_2018_Update_3_Install_03_03_2019_18_57_42.log - And note that if you have more than one install log (from installing or uninstalling the update more than once), be sure to look at the one whose date and time is the most recent
- This will be a file with the date and time that you ran the update, such as
- Open that log file in a text editor
- Now, look to see if there were errors. But do not go to the bottom of the log
- Just page down once or twice
- Look for the table reporting “successes” and “errors”. Here’s an example:
Summary
-------Installation: Successful.
3120 Successes
0 Warnings
0 NonFatalErrors
0 FatalErrors
And of course you want to see all successes, without any errors (of either type, nor warnings, really). What if there are errors? See the next section.
And I would note that whether the update “seems to work” or not, you should always just make it a best practice to look at the install log to confirm there were no errors.
What if there ARE errors?
So, what if there ARE some fatal or nonfatal errors reported? Well, there is much more I could say about that, and indeed I have, elsewhere. See below for an elaborated post I have on that, where I share common problems and solutions in applying updates. I wrote that in 2016, and it’s lengthy, sharing years of experience helping people since the new update process came out with CF10 in 2012.
I will say briefly here that in nearly all cases, the problem causing errors in the install log is about something that was running (related to CF) which kept the update from being able to update or delete files it wanted to process.
If you wanted to try running the installer again (no need to even run its available uninstaller), you could just at a minimum:
- try stopping all CF’s related services
- then restart CF and the web server once (for good measure)
- then trying to run the installer again.
I know it may not seem to make sense to think that will work, and it may not alone solve your problem. I share more in that other blog post below.
This post here was more about finding out IF indeed your update DID have any errors, since so many just never even notice or, or don’t know where to look in the first place.
Want to learn still more about dealing with update problems?
Again, I did a more elaborated blog post with still more detail, focused on solving common problems with applying CF updates, which some may find helpful, and whether you are CF10, 11, 2016, 2018–or 2020, if you may be reading this in the future!
How to solve common problems with applying ColdFusion updates (in 10 and above)
Finally, on a related matter, in case you may also try updating the JVM that CF uses (whether along with an update or separately), I have another elaborated post on solving common problems that can happen with that:
CF911: ‘Help! I’ve updated the JVM which ColdFusion uses, and now it won’t start!’
Bottom line: problems with updating CF and the JVM can be disastrous if you don’t know what’s going on or how to quickly recover. These resources should help you if it happens to you!
But at least with this post you now know where to look to see if your update did indeed have errors or not. If it did, then you need to deal with those before trying to understand why some feature in CF seems to have “suddenly stopped working” after an update.
The post Having problems after applying a CF update? What to check first! appeared first on ColdFusion.
