Lucee 8.0.0.186 (RC) breaking changes?

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I normally am pretty confident to try RC version of Lucee in staging, but since this one is changing the way the config works i just don’t want to rollback too deep in case there’s too many things to debug/modify at once. Is there any major breaking change around the CFConfig.json that i should be aware of ?

Any doc or changelog of v8 somewhere ? I’ve searched for a while but don’t find anything.

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Hi Kim, sorry for the late answer.

Short version: the .CFConfig.json format hasn’t changed. Lucee 8 reads the same file from the same place, and almost all keys keep their names. What changed is how Lucee loads the config internally. That brings a few things to check before you upgrade staging:

  • If your .CFConfig.json has the debugging settings (debuggingTemplate, debuggingDatabase, …, showDebug) at the top level, move them into a monitoring block. Do the same for the default cache connections (cacheDefaultQuery etc. go into cache as defaultQuery etc.) and the old updateProxy* keys (into proxy). Lucee 8 gives no error or warning if they stay at the top level, it just ignores them, so this one is easy to miss. The page has a table with every key and where it goes.
  • extensionProviders now takes Maven group IDs (for example org.lucee). URL providers are ignored.
  • A few env vars got new names, for example LUCEE_LISTENER_TYPE / LUCEE_LISTENER_MODE instead of LUCEE_APPLICATION_LISTENER / LUCEE_APPLICATION_MODE. The old names still work, so nothing breaks, but the new ones are preferred.
  • Every setting can now be set via an env var, and env vars win over the config file, so check for leftover LUCEE_* variables.
  • If you script the admin, some Administrator.cfc / cfadmin argument names changed to match the config keys.

Outside the config, the biggest change is that Lucee 8 needs Java 21. Also worth checking: parallel=true in arrayEach() and friends now runs on virtual threads with no limit by default, and the bundled PDF extension 3.0 uses a new rendering engine, so compare your cfdocument output.

All of this, with before/after examples, is on the new breaking changes page: Breaking Changes between Lucee 7.1 and 8.0. The next 8.0 RC comes out on Monday.

If you run into anything there that isn’t covered, just post it here.