Upgrade a Confluence cluster manually without downtime

This document provides step-by-step instructions on how to perform a rolling upgrade on deployments with little or no automation. These instructions are also suitable for deployments based on our Azure templates. 

Step 1: Download upgrade files

Step 2: Enable upgrade mode

Step 3: Upgrade the first node

Once the status of the node is offline, you can start upgrading the node. Copy the Confluence installation file you downloaded to the local file system for that node.

To upgrade the first node:

Upgrade Synchrony (optional)

If you've chosen to let Confluence manage Synchrony for you (recommended), you don't need to do anything. Synchrony was automatically upgraded with Confluence. 

If you're running your own Synchrony cluster, grab the new synchrony-standalone.jar from the <local-home> directory on your upgraded Confluence node. Then, perform the following steps on each Synchrony node:

1. Stop Synchrony on the node using either the start-synchrony.sh (for Linux) or start-synchrony.bat (for Windows) file from the Synchrony home directory.  
2. Copy the new synchrony-standalone.jar to your Synchrony home directory.
3. Start Synchrony as normal.

See Set up a Synchrony cluster for Confluence Data Center for related information.

Step 4: Upgrade all other nodes individually

After starting the upgraded node, wait for its status to change to Active in the Cluster overview. At this point you should check the application logs for that node, and log in to Confluence on that node to make sure everything is working. It's still possible to roll back the upgrade at this point, so taking some time to test is recommended. 

Once you've tested the first node, you can start upgrading another node, following the same steps. Do this for each remaining node – as always, we recommend that you upgrade the node with the least number of running tasks each time.

Step 5: Finalize the upgrade

Troubleshooting 

Node errors during rolling upgrade

Upgrade tasks failed error

Roll back a node to its original version

Disconnect a node from the cluster through the load balancer

Traffic is disproportionately distributed during or after upgrade

Node won't start up