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Best Practices for Upgrading FME Flow

Richard Mosley
Richard Mosley
  • Updated

Introduction

FME is an amazingly flexible and customizable application. This article outlines strategies to ensure your upgrade or migration proceeds as smoothly as possible.  

This article will focus on the software upgrade. Workspace upgrades can be incorporated in this upgrade process, and should be if you are upgrading from an unsupported version, but ideally, you can wait for a workspace maintenance cycle to upgrade your workspaces if you choose  

Considerations

Hardware

  • Please make sure your Operating System is up to date with our system requirements.
  • Ensure you have enough RAM and CPUs.
  • In-place upgrades limit the ability to thoroughly test the upgrade. Upgrading to a second machine is highly recommended.
  • Confirm your architecture requirements have not changed.

Software

Before You Begin

  • Procure a new server.
  • Licensing: Please contact your account manager or partner for transition licenses.
  • Networking Considerations:
    • Confirm the machine has the appropriate URLS Used by FME whitelisted.
    • Confirm if any Hostname and DNS changes are needed.
  • Get an SSL certificate for the new machine.
  • Gather any service accounts, database passwords, or keys you may need for installation.
  • Confirm that your Python is compatible with the shipped Python version.
  • Set up any new SPNs or other network requirements for the machine.
  • Are you using Deployment Parameters, or will you need to adjust the connections during testing to ensure you're not testing in production?

Backup

  • Review which FME Flow components are not restored.
  • If you choose to do an in-place upgrade, manually back up the configuration for reference and take a snapshot of the instance.
  • If you are using FME Flow version control and want to view past versions after upgrading, push changes to a remote GitHub repository.
  • Download the current Encryption Key and store it in a safe place. A suggested practice is to rename the encryption key file with the date it was created, since the encryption key can be changed.

Installation and Configuration

  • Install or restore 3rd-party dependencies.
  • Install FME Flow.
  • Launch the UI and log in, and create a new admin password.

Restoring the Content and Testing

Safe Software works diligently to ensure FME remains backward compatible between release versions. However, updating the workspace can help you take advantage of new features and account for any changes in defaults. However, general performance improvements can come from upgrading FME Form (the engine), even without upgrading transformers.

If you are using FME Flow version control, you can retrieve the version history from your remote GitHub repository after restoring the backup. Note that fetching from the remote repository will only pull down the version history if there is a workspace to associate it with, so workspaces must be restored first.

Suggested Method

  • Apply the Encryption Key (older versions using weak encryption might not need the key).
  • Apply a license file or request a new license with the provided serial number.
  • Manually reconfigure items not included in packages:
  • Group your objects and workflows into logical projects:
    • Some project groupings may be an Automation, Schedule, Notification, Stream, or Flow Apps. Repositories can also work if you are light on automations.
  • Migrate each Automation one at a time using projects.
  • Optional: If you choose to update your workspace during migration, you can follow the suggestions in the workspace compatibility article to upgrade the components in FME Form. Once updated and tested in FME Form, republish the workspaces to FME Flow.
  • Test Automation on FME Flow (Debug mode will be helpful).
  • View Automation Logs and check if an internal or external action fails. Please check your machine's networking and settings.
  • If a workspace fails, download the workspace, adjust it in FME Form, and test it before republishing.
  • Repeat the migration for each project. 
  • Allow the update to run for a period of time to ensure success.
  • Switch servers and any DNS/Networking changes to use the new server.
  • Decommission the old server when ready.

Key Points

  • Document everything: Keep detailed notes of environment changes, service accounts' passwords, and key players who may be needed to deploy the infrastructure.
  • Use Projects: Keeping your work organized in projects can help you manage dependencies effectively. When creating an FME Flow project, FME automatically searches for the dependencies required. This allows you to safely bundle and migrate specific workflows.

Please reach out to support if you have any questions or concerns

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As of January 14th, 2026, comments on knowledge base articles have been closed. To make sure questions don’t get missed and to enable more community support, we’ve moved discussions to the FME Community. If you have a question or a comment about this article, please create a new post or create a support ticket.