4.14.x to 4.15.x Migration Guide

This is a minor HiveMQ upgrade. HiveMQ 4.15 is a drop in replacement for HiveMQ 4.14.x.

You can learn more about all the new features HiveMQ 4.15 introduces in our release blogpost.

HiveMQ is prepackaged with multiple HiveMQ Enterprise Extensions (disabled), the open-source MQTT CLI tool, and the HiveMQ Swarm load-testing tool (both located in the tools folder of your HiveMQ installation).

Starting with the HiveMQ 4.9 LTS release, HiveMQ provides enhanced version compatibility for all HiveMQ releases.
For more information, see HiveMQ Rolling Upgrade Policy and our Introducing Flexible MQTT Platform Upgrades with HiveMQ blog post.

When you migrate from one HiveMQ version to another, review the upgrade information for each version between your current HiveMQ version and the target HiveMQ version.
Note changes that are relevant to your use case and adjust your configuration as needed.

Upgrade a HiveMQ Cluster

Rolling upgrades are supported, and it is possible to run HiveMQ version 4.14 and version 4.15 simultaneously in the same cluster. By default, the HiveMQ cluster enables all new cluster features when all nodes are upgraded to the new version. No manual intervention is required.

Please follow the instructions in our user guide to ensure a seamless and successful rolling upgrade.

For more information, see HiveMQ Clustering Documentation.

Upgrade a Single-node HiveMQ Instance

  • Create a backup of the entire HiveMQ 4.14.x installation folder from which you want to migrate

  • Install HiveMQ 4.15 as described in the HiveMQ Installation Guide

  • Migrate the contents of the configuration file from your old HiveMQ 4.14.x installation

  • To migrate your persistent data, copy everything from the data folder of your backup to the data folder of the new HiveMQ 4.15 installation.

Configuration File Changes

You can upgrade from HiveMQ 4.14.x to HiveMQ 4.15 without making changes to your configuration file.

Since 4.10.0, HiveMQ prevents the startup if your configuration file contains invalid values. For more information, see New Validation Behavior for HiveMQ Configuration File.

Persistent Data Migration

When you migrate, HiveMQ 4.15 automatically updates the file storage formats of all the data that you copied into your new data folder.

To migrate the persistent data, you must copy everything in the data folder of the previous HiveMQ 4.14.x installation to the data folder of your new HiveMQ 4.15 installation.

Linux example
cp -r /opt/hivemq-4.14.0/data/* /opt/hivemq-4.15.0/data/

The first time you start HiveMQ 4.15, the file storage formats of the persistent data from your previous installation are automatically updated in the new persistent storage.

Native SSL Default Communication Protocols

Due to security concerns, the OpenJDK Java platform no longer enables TLSv1 and TLSv1.1 by default. As a result, Java applications such as HiveMQ that use TLS to communicate now require TLS 1.2 or above to establish a connection.

To align with the OpenJDK Java platform, from HiveMQ 4.7 onwards, HiveMQ only enables the following TLS protocols by default for native SSL:

  • TLSv1.3

  • TLSv1.2

If you still need to support legacy TLS versions such as TLSv1 or TLSv1.1 for your Native SSL implementation, you must explicitly enable the versions in your tls-tcp-listener configuration. For more information, see Communication Protocol and Native SSL.
Example configuration for native SSL with explicit legacy TLS configuration
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<hivemq xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">

    ...
    <listeners>
        ...
        <tls-tcp-listener>
            <tls>
                ...
                <!-- Enable specific TLS versions manually -->
                <protocols>
                    <protocol>TLSv1.1</protocol>
                </protocols>
                <native-ssl>true</native-ssl>
                ...
            </tls>
        </tls-tcp-listener>
    </listeners>
    ...
</hivemq>

New Location for HiveMQ Enterprise Extension Configuration Files

To increase consistency and ease of use, the HiveMQ 4.15 platform release unifies the default configuration file location for all HiveMQ Enterprise extensions.

Starting with HiveMQ 4.15, the configuration location for each enterprise extension is conf/config.xml:

  • HiveMQ Enterprise Extension for Kafka: HIVEMQ_HOME/extensions/hivemq-kafka-extension/conf/config.xml

  • HiveMQ Enterprise Security Extension: HIVEMQ_HOME/extensions/hivemq-enterprise-security-extension/conf/config.xml

  • HiveMQ Enterprise Extension for Amazon Kinesis: HIVEMQ_HOME/extensions/hivemq-amazon-kinesis-extension/conf/config.xml

  • HiveMQ Enterprise Distributed Tracing Extension: HIVEMQ_HOME/extensions/hivemq-distributed-tracing-extension/conf/config.xml

  • HiveMQ Enterprise Bridge Extension: HIVEMQ_HOME/extensions/hivemq-bridge-extension/conf/config.xml

  • HiveMQ Enterprise Extension for Google Cloud Pub/Sub: HIVEMQ_HOME/extensions/hivemq-google-cloud-pubsub-extension/conf/config.xml

HiveMQ platform file structure
└─ <HiveMQ folder>
├── README.txt
├── audit
├── backup
├── bin
├── conf
├── data
├── extensions
│   ├── hivemq-<enterprise-extension-name>
│   │   ├── conf
│   │   │   ├── config.xml (needs to be added by the user)
│   │   │   ├── config.xsd
│   │   │   └── examples
│   │   │       └── config.xml (an example configuration)
│   │   ├── <enterprise-extension-name>.jar
│   │   ├── hivemq-extension.xml
│   │   └── third-party-licenses
│   │
├── license
├── log
├── third-party-licenses
└── tools
The previously-used configuration file locations are still supported, but can be deprecated in future versions. We recommend that you move your existing configurations to the new location.