Upgrade from Community to Subscription

Upgrading means moving from a Bonita Community edition environment to any Bonita Subscription edition environment.

To Check before upgrading

An upgrade can only be performed on a single Bonita version. You cannot migrate to a new version at the same time as you upgrade to Subscription edition.
Eg. You can only upgrade from Bonita 7.3.3 Community edition to Bonita 7.3.3 Subscription edition. You cannot upgrade from Bonita 7.3.3 Community to Bonita 7.4.0 Subscription.
After it is applied, an upgrade cannot be undone.

An upgrade is performed in two phases.

Bonita Studio upgrade

To upgrade a Community edition Bonita Studio and its resources (such as process diagrams, data models), follow these steps:

Install a Bonita Studio Subscription edition.
Export your resources from the Bonita Studio Community edition to .bos files. We recommend that you keep these resource files as a backup.
Import your resource files into the Bonita Studio in Subscription edition.

The upgrade is performed automatically and silently when importing resources into Bonita Studio Subscription edition.

Remember that an upgrade is a non-reversible operation: after your resources are imported in the Subscription edition, you will not be able to export from the Subscription edition Studio and then import them back into the Community edition.

Bonita platform upgrade

Upgrading a Bonita platform allows you to keep the platform data (process definitions, cases, BDM…) while benefiting from the Subscription edition features.

The upgrade procedure is quite simple and only requires a limited service downtime (less than an hour for basic configurations).

A Bonita platform upgrade can only be performed on the same database type.

To upgrade a Bonita platform from Community edition to a Subscription edition, follow these steps:

Install the Subscription Bundle but do not start it. We will call this installation folder bonita-subscription.
Configure the Subscription installation to use your existing database editing the file <bonita-subscription>/setup/database.properties. Beware of backslash characters.
Shut down the Community server being migrated using the stop-bonita script, we will call this installation folder bonita-community.
Run <bonita-community>/setup/setup(.sh/.bat) pull to fetch your current Community configuration in <bonita-community>/setup/platform_conf/current and copy this last in a different folder, we will call this new folder bonita-community-configuration.
Backup your Bonita platform and databases.
Update the configuration using the Platform setup tool in bonita-subscription:
1. Create the folder <bonita-subscription>/setup/platform_conf/current, we will call it bonita-subscription-configuration.
2. Copy the content of the <bonita-subscription>/setup/platform_conf/initial to bonita-subscription-configuration.
3. In the bonita-subscription-configuration, reapply the modifications for all the folders but the one named tenants (use bonita-community-configuration as a reference).
4. Create the folder <bonita-subscription-configuration>/tenants.
5. For each folder contained in <bonita-community-configuration>/tenants.
  1. We will call this folder bonita-community-configuration-tenant.
  2. Create one folder with the same name as bonita-community-configuration-tenant in <bonita-subscription-configuration>/tenants, we will call it bonita-subscription-configuration-tenant.
  3. Copy all folders with prefix tenant_template_ from bonita-subscription-configuration to bonita-subscription-configuration-tenant and remove the prefix in their names.
  4. In the bonita-subscription-configuration-tenant, reapply the modifications (user bonita-community-configuration-tenant as a reference).
6. Run <bonita-subscription>/setup/setup(.sh/.bat) push to push the migrated configuration bonita-subscription-configuration in database.
Start the migrated platform using the start-bonita script located in bonita-subscription.

The Upgrade is now finished, you can verify that you are now running a subscription edition in the portal user interface, the dialog displayed from the top right "Settings / About" menu should indicate the correct Subscription edition.