Updating Magnolia

To update Magnolia:

1. Stop the application server.
2. Extract the new Magnolia bundle.
3. Replace JAR files in the WEB-INF/lib folder of your old Magnolia instances with new JARs from the bundle.
4. Remove any module JARs you had previously removed from your instances. Add any modules you might have added.
5. Optional: Delete all indexes to give them a little boost. Delete the index folder under each workspace directory: repositories/magnolia/workspaces/<workspace>/index. Indexes are recreated on startup, which might take a while depending on the size of your repository.
6. If you customized magnolia.properties files, compare the changes to the file in the new bundle. Properties may have been added and removed.
7. Read release notes for all intermediary versions for any additional update tasks.
8. Restart the application server.
9. Using your browser, go to the Magnolia instances and run the Web update.

Recommendations when upgrading Magnolia CMS:

1. Update to your latest minor release version first before upgrade to recent major release. For example as of May 2017, a customer would like to upgrade from 5.4.1 to 5.5.4 (latest release at that time), then the correct sequence would be 5.4.8 --> 5.4.12 --> 5.5.4 instead of  5.4.8 --> 5.5 --> 5.5.4.
2. Carefully look for "change" sections such as [Release notes for Magnolia CORE 5.4.12#Changefor5.4.x] whereas that changes is necessary in this specific case when you are updating from 5.4.1 solely.
3. Because upgrading process takes time and vulnerable to incidents, please minimize the risk by clean up your system, remove unused data, reindex everything and do a full backup first.