Overview
ColdFusion has a built-in uninstaller in newer releases of ColdFusion that allows you to easily uninstall an update (aka hotfix) in the event that a recent update has made your application or applications inoperable.
In this article we will cover the steps required for reverting to a previous ColdFusion update.
Steps to Uninstall ColdFusion Update (Hotfix):
Locate the uninstaller jar file - First you will need to locate the uninstaller for the most recent ColdFusion update. By default all of your ColdFusion updates will be located in the hf-updates directory within your ColdFusion instance root.
<cf install path>/<instance name>/hf-updates/
The default location for this would be:
Windows: C:\ColdFusion2016\cfusion\hf-updates\
Linux: /opt/coldfusion2016/cfusion/hf-updates/
We’ll continue with Windows and CF2016 for the rest of this article. In this example, the full path to the uninstaller jar for the latest update would be:
C:\ColdFusion2016\cfusion\hf-updates\hf-2016-00006-308055\uninstall\uninstaller.jar
Run the jar with java - Now that you’ve located your uninstaller jar you can begin the process of reverting to the previous hotfix installed on your ColdFusion application.
From within Windows open a command prompt window as administrator. On Linux, utilize sudo to escalate your privileges. Next, you will be able to execute the following command.
java -jar <path to jar file>
If you receive an error that this is an unrecognized command you will need to update your server’s environment path variable or you can specify the full path to the java executable.
Finish the uninstall - The uninstaller jar will handle everything for you. There will be a brief interactive interface that will require you click the ‘Uninstall’ button. After this, the remainder of the uninstall process will be non-interactive and will show you a status bar.
Once the uninstall of your update completes you will receive a prompt that the uninstall has completed successfully and you can then click the ‘Done’ button.
After the uninstall has completed successfully there will be a uninstall log uploaded to the update directory that you can review. <cf install path>/<instance name>/hf-updates/
Congratulations! You’ve successfully uninstalled a ColdFusion update.