Below are some important notes on upgrading to Confluence 5.6. For details of the new features and improvements in this release, please read the Confluence 5.6 Release Notes.

On this page:

Upgrade notes

Data collection in Confluence

Confluence now collects usage information to help us improve the product. All data we collect is subject to the terms of our Privacy Policy and our End User Agreement.

For more information, or to opt out go to  > General Configuration > Analytics.

Server vs Data Center

We've updated the names of our Confluence editions on the downloads page. 

• Confluence Server is the standard, non-clustered edition.
• Confluence Data Center is the clustered edition, specifically for large enterprises. 

Reducing noisy notifications

Notifications will no longer be sent when a page is moved. 

Shared home directory for clustered installations

We have introduced the concept of a shared home directory for clustered installations. All cluster nodes will now need to be configured with a path to a directory that is shared between all nodes.

When upgrading from an existing cluster to Confluence Data Center some additional steps apply. 

Cache configuration

Cache configurations are now stored in:

• <confluence-home>/shared-home/config/cache-settings-overrides.properties in Confluence Server (standalone)
• <confluence-shared-home>/config/cache-settings-overrides.properties in Confluence Data Center (clustered)

These files were previously named ehcache.properties and confluence-coherence-cache-config-clustered.xml.

Changes to setenv.sh and setenv.bat

Confluence now uses the CATALINA_OPTS environment variable, rather than JAVA_OPTS to pass Java runtime options to Tomcat. The system properties themselves have not changed, but some command line arguments have changed, including memory and garbage collection. 

When reapplying any previous customizations you should use the CATALINA_OPTS variable, and take into account that the default garbage collector is now G1 and that detailed GC log files are now generated.

Known issues

Incorrect license message in footer 

If you have a Confluence Starter license and upgrade to Confluence 5.6 you will see the following incorrect message in the footer "EVALUATION LICENSE Are you enjoying Confluence? Please consider purchasing it today".  Other license types (commercial, developer, etc) are not affected. See  CONF-34780 - Getting issue details... STATUS . This issue only affects the appearance of the footer and is not a problem with your license. 

We have now released Confluence 5.6.1 which resolves this issue.  

Some translations not available in 5.6

Translations for some new features are not available in this release. We hope to make these translations available shortly after this release (in a bug fix release).  If you use a language pack other than English, we do not recommend you upgrade to Confluence 5.6 yet. 

Database collation

  If you're running Confluence with Microsoft SQL we require database collation to be set to SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CS_AS from Confluence 5.5.3 onwards. See Can't start or upgrade Confluence due to an error with MS SQL Server database collation for more information. 

End of support announcements

• End of support for Tomcat 6.0.x 
  As previously announced, from this release onward we no longer support Tomcat 6.0.x. 

• End of support for Internet Explorer 
  As previously announced, from this release onward we no longer support Internet Explorer 8. 

• Advance Notice: WAR edition will not be available after 5.6
  To help us to make Confluence a more robust and scalable application, we have decided to stop providing an EAR/WAR distribution. This means that the only supported application server will be will be the version of Tomcat that is bundled with each release.
  This release (Confluence 5.6) will be the last release to include a EAR/WAR edition. 

• Advance Notice: End of support for PostgreSQL 8.4, 9.0 and 9.1 
  Confluence 5.6 will be the last release that supports PostgreSQL 8.4, 9.0 and 9.1. 

• Advance Notice: End of support for MySQL 5.1 
  Confluence 5.6 will be the last release that supports MySQL 5.1. 

See End of Support Announcements for Confluence for more information.

Upgrade procedure

Note: Upgrade to a test environment first. Test your upgrades in your test environment before rolling them into production.

If you are already running a version of Confluence, please follow these instructions to upgrade to the latest version:

1. Go to  > General Configuration > Support Tools > Health Check to check your license validity, application server, database setup and more.
2. Before you upgrade, we strongly recommend that you back up your installation directory, home directory and database. 
3.  If your version of Confluence is earlier than 5.5, read the release notes and upgrade guides for all releases between your version and the latest version.
4.  Download the latest version of Confluence.
5.  Follow the instructions in the Upgrade Guide.

 The following upgrade steps only apply to existing clustered installations

Follow the normal upgrade procedure, but execute the following steps immediately after shutting down the existing cluster:

1. Create a directory that is visible to all cluster nodes in the same path.

2. Shut down the cluster.

3. Edit confluence.cfg.xml in the home directory of each node and add a new property called confluence.cluster.home with the path of the shared directory as the value. Example:

   <property name="confluence.cluster.home">/mnt/confluence-shared-home</property>

4. Move all the files/directories from a home directory on one node to the new shared home directory except for the following:Remove the moved files/directories from the home directories on all other nodes.

   • config
   • confluence.cfg.xml
   • index
   • temp
   • bundled-plugins
   • plugin-cache-*
   • plugins-cache
   • plugins-osgi-cache
   • plugins-temp

5. Continue to follow the normal upgrade procedure. 

Checking for known issues and troubleshooting the Confluence upgrade

After you have completed the steps required to upgrade your Confluence installation, check all the items on the Confluence post-upgrade checklist to ensure that everything works as expected. If something is not working correctly, please check for known Confluence issues and try troubleshooting your upgrade as described below:

• Check for known issues. Sometimes we find out about a problem with the latest version of Confluence after we have released the software. In such cases we publish information about the known issues in the Confluence Knowledge Base.
• Check for answers from the community. Other users may have encountered the same issue. You can check for answers from the community at Atlassian Community.
• Did you encounter a problem during the Confluence upgrade? Please refer to the guide to troubleshooting upgrades in the Confluence Knowledge Base.

• If you encounter a problem during the upgrade and cannot solve it, please create a support ticket and one of our support engineers will help you.