Confluence 7.9 Upgrade Notes
Here are some important notes on upgrading to Confluence 7.9. For details of the new features and improvements in this release, see the Confluence 7.9 Release Notes.
On this page:
Upgrade notes
Change to index architecture
In this release we have made some changes to the Lucene search index to improve performance and stability. One of these changes is to split the index into two parts, a content index and change index.
Split index upgrade task
When you upgrade to Confluence 7.9, an upgrade task will make two copies of your entire index, remove the relevant content to create the content index and change index, then remove the original files. This means you’ll need enough free disk space in your local home directory to temporarily accommodate three copies of your index. This process will take some time for very large sites.
In our test, it took less than an hour to run the scripts to split a 90 GB index. However, creating the copies of the index prior to this step took just over five hours (on a c5.2xlarge EC2 instance). You may need to give your instance more IOPS.
Split index upgrade task - clustered Data Center
In addition to the information above, if you run Confluence in a cluster, and there is no index in the local home directory at the point of upgrade, we'll grab the snapshot from the shared home directory and restore that before beginning the upgrade task. Once the upgrade task is complete, we'll generate a new snapshot and save it to the shared home. Subsequent nodes can then grab the snapshot from the shared home, the upgrade task won't need to split the index on every node.
Journal entry upgrade task
Once the index has been split, another upgrade task will update entries in the journal entry table. This one should only take a few minutes in a large site. You won't be able to use Confluence until both the split index and journal entry upgrade tasks have completed successfully.
End of support announcements
No end of support announcements at this time.
Infrastructure changes
Head to Preparing for Confluence 7.9 to find out more about changes under the hood.
Known issues
- There is a known issue when running Confluence with MySQL 8.0.29 and later due to a change to the UTF8 alias in MySQL. We're working on a fix, but if you have Confluence 7.3 or later, you can change the character set and collation to UTF8MB4 to avoid this issue. See How to Fix the Collation and Character Set of a MySQL Database manually.
If you are upgrading from Confluence 6.3 or earlier, there's a known issue where spaces do not appear in the space directory. You'll need to reindex your site after upgrading to fix this.
- If you use Apache to limit who can access the admin console, you should update your configuration. See Using Apache to limit access to the Confluence administration interface for our suggested configuration.
- There is a known issue where read-only mode attempts to write to
<shared-home>/confluence.cfg.xml, but the file doesn't exist in the shared home directory. This problem affects sites that have been previously upgraded from Confluence 6.0 or earlier. See Could not save access.mode into the shared confluence.cfg.xml file error after upgrading to Confluence Data Center 6.10 - There is a known issue where some fonts that Confluence relies on are not available in older Linux distributions. See Confluence UI shows garbled or corrupt text on CAPTCHA, macros and/or diagrams due to missing fonts.
If you encounter a problem during the upgrade and can't solve it, please create a support ticket and one of our support engineers will help you.
Upgrade procedure
Always test the upgrade in a test environment before upgrading in production.
To upgrade Confluence to the latest version:
- Go to Administration
> General Configuration > Plan your upgrade and select the version you want to upgrade to. This will run the pre-upgrade checks. - Go to Administration > General Configuration > Troubleshooting and support tools to check your license validity, application server, database setup and more.
- If your version of Confluence is more than one version behind, read the release notes and upgrade guides for all releases between your version and the latest version.
- Back up your installation directory, home directory and database.
- Download the latest version of Confluence.
- Follow the instructions in the Upgrade Guide.
Update configuration files after upgrading
The contents of configuration files such as server.xml, web.xml , setenv.bat / setenv.sh and confluenceinit.properties change from time to time.
When upgrading, we recommend manually reapplying any additions to these files (such as proxy configuration, datasource, JVM parameters) rather than simply overwriting the file with the file from your previous installation, otherwise you will miss out on any improvements we have made.