Is it possible to execute a confluence upgrade task without manually starting up the new version?

Question

The confluence upgrade procedures documented on Atlassian's website  essentially have the administrator point the new standalone to the old data directory and execute "startup.sh" from within the new version of Confluence.  When the new version of Confluence starts up, it looks up the build # from the data directory of the old Confluence and determines to kick off the "UpgradeTask" and does a bunch of stuff (like migrating Confluence Pages and Blogs,etc..).

My Question: Is it possible rip out the upgrade task into an executable standalone JAR file?

The file WEB-INF/lib/conflence-upgrade-task.jar  within the confluence subdirectory appears to be a prime candidate.

Walter Ryans · Answer

Hi Ann -

We are trying to upgrade to Confluence 6.2 from Confluence 4.3 and I want to avoid upgrading to Confluence 5 first.

Therefore I want to "trick" confluence into thinking I have already upgraded to Confluence 5 if I can extract Confluence 5's upgrade task.  I have already pinpointed the JAR file in WEB-INF/lib that does the upgrade.  I was wondering if somebody could let me know how to make it executable.

AnnWorley · Answer

I am not sure from your question what you would like to achieve by isolating the upgrade tasks. Please elaborate, I would like to help more.

Just to be precise, we recommend using start-confluence.sh, rather than the startup.sh script.

In most of the cases covered in Upgrading Confluence the installer for your OS is the recommended upgrade method.

Upgrading requires running the upgrade tasks against the database, but also entails using the new versions of the application files, that's why the manual upgrade method is to start the new version against the old home directory.