Confluence 5.7 Upgrade Notes
Below are some important notes on upgrading to Confluence 5.7. For details of the new features and improvements in this release, please read the Confluence 5.7 Release Notes.
On this page:
Upgrade notes
Changes to memory allocation
We've increased the recommended PermGen allocation to 384mb for new installations. If you're upgrading to Confluence 5.7 we recommend manually increasing your PermGen allocation to avoid PermGen errors.
Go to <installation-directory>/bin/setenv.bat or setenv.sh and change the value of -XX:MaxPermSize parameter from 256m to 384m, or if you're running Confluence as a Windows service, you can follow these steps to update the setting.
Changes to how group membership is determined from multiple user directories
In this release we've changed how group memberships are determined for users that belong to multiple user directories (such as LDAP, Active Directory, Crowd). Group memberships are now aggregated from all directories, not the first one the user appears in.
In most cases, this change will have no impact as users generally only exist in one directory, or their memberships are correctly synchronized between user directories. In some rare cases, where group memberships are out of synch, the change may lead to users gaining permissions to view spaces and pages (if they are a member a group in a user directory that was previously being ignored by Confluence).
This is Issac. Something went wrong a while ago, so he's got the same username in two user directories, but belongs to different groups.
Right now, the user directories in his organization's Confluence site look like this:
and Issac's group memberships in each directory looks like this:
The 'Dev Team' page is restricted to the developers group.
- In Confluence 5.6 and earlier, Issac couldn't see this page as we determined his group membership from Active Directory - because it's the first directory in the list it had the highest priority.
- In Confluence 5.7 and beyond, Issac will see the page because we determine his group membership from all directories, not just the highest one.
To Confluence his group membership looks like this:
This means after the 5.7 upgrade he can see any pages and spaces that are restricted to the 'developers' group.
If you have critical permissions based on groups in Confluence, and duplicate users who have different group memberships in multiple user directories, it's possible to use the REST API to turn off aggregating memberships. The hierarchical order of user directories will be enforced and membership determined from the first (highest priority) directory the user is found in. See Managing Multiple Directories to find out how.
Attachments are now ContentEntityObjects
As part of our work to improve the files experience, the way attachment metadata is stored in the database has changed. This change will have no visible impact to your Confluence site, but if you've developed any custom plugins related to attachments, you should check our developer documentation for more information about this change.
Upgrade tasks in this release
This release contains an upgrade task related to the way attachment metadata is stored in the database. In very large instances with lots of attachments, this upgrade task may take some time to complete.
View file macro cache in-memory change
The View File macros (PDF, Word, Excel and Powerpoint) cache data temporarily. We've removed the option for this data to be cached in memory, as it was known to cause problems. If you had previously set the Office Connector to use the cache in-memory setting, when you upgrade to Confluence 5.7 it'll revert to temporarily storing this data in the Confluence Home Directory.
Roadmap planner macro
This macro replaces the existing Confluence Roadmap macro which was available from the marketplace. If you have any roadmaps created with version 11 or earlier of this add-on, you'll be able to view the roadmaps in Confluence 5.7, but not edit them.
Changes to default image thumbnail sizes
The small, medium and large thumbnail buttons on the image properties panel have changed. They now use height instead of width, for ease of aligning multiple thumbnails on your page, and the sizes are 150px, 250px and 400px high (previously they were 100px, 300px and 500px wide).
File conversion service
The new preview experience relies on a file conversion service that runs in the JVM with Confluence. If you experience out of memory errors processing complex Office or PDF documents increasing the memory allocated to the JVM can help. See this knowledge base article for more info.
Disabling inline comments
If you don't want to use the inline and pinned commenting features, you can choose to disable them. For example, your Confluence site might be used for public-facing content, and you'd prefer your audience to create page comments, rather than inline comments.
- For inline comments on pages disable the Confluence Inline Comments system add-on.
- For pinned comments on files disable the Annotation plugin for the File viewer module of the Confluence Previews system add-on.
Any existing inline or pinned comments won't be visible once you disable these system add-ons.
Visual changes in Confluence 5.7
We've made some small visual changes in this release:
- The Tools menu on a page or blog now looks like
and is called 'more actions'.
The pattern is also used in the file preview and inline comments, when there are more actions available. - Warnings and errors are now more prominent.
- The search bar is now blue, and more subtle.
Colors for Search Field Background and Search Field Text have been added to the color scheme so you can customize the color of the search field.
No EAR/WAR distribution
As previously announced, to help us to make Confluence a more robust and scalable application, we no longer provide an EAR/WAR distribution. This means that the only supported application server is the version of Tomcat that is bundled with each release.
If you are currently using the EAR/WAR distribution to deploy Confluence into an existing application server, you'll need to follow our instructions for Upgrading Confluence Manually using the standalone distribution (you can't use the installer for this upgrade).
This upgrade method does not use an installer or run any scripts. Essentially you extract the file (this will be your new installation directory), point it to your existing home directory, copy over your database drivers and other essential files then start Confluence to kick off the upgrade.
We strongly recommend taking a snapshot of your production environment and upgrading this test environment first, especially if you have customizations that will need to be re-applied.
New supported platforms
In this release, we've added support for the Java Runtime Engine (JRE) 8, as well as maintaining support for JRE 7. Note that third-party plugins must still be compiled using the Java Development Kit (JDK) 7, as Java 8 bytecode isn't supported in this release.
We expect to drop support for the JRE 7 in Confluence 5.8, and only support JRE 8. This is in line with Oracle's decision to stop providing public updates for JRE 7 in April 2015. In addition, the next major release will add support for Java 8 bytecode.
See our note on fully qualified hostname resolution in Java 8.
We've also added support for the following databases:
- Oracle 12c
- Microsoft SQL Server 2014
End of support announcements
- End of support for PostgreSQL 8.4, 9.0 and 9.1
As previously announced, from this release onward we no longer support PostgreSQL 8.4, 9.0, or 9.1. - End of support for MySQL 5.1
As previously announced, from this release onward we no longer support MySQL 5.1 Advance notice: End of support for Java 7 in Confluence 5.8
We're planning to end support for Java 7 (JRE and JDK 1.7) in Confluence 5.8
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're already running a version of Confluence, please follow these instructions to upgrade to the latest version:
- Go to
> General Configuration > Support Tools > Health Check to check your license validity, application server, database setup and more. - Before you upgrade, we strongly recommend that you back up your installation directory, home directory and database.
- 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.
- Download the latest version of Confluence.
- Follow the instructions in the Upgrade Guide.
Known issues
Listen port issues
Some customers have experienced problems with the listen port for Confluence defaulting back to 8090 after upgrading to Confluence 5.7. more details here CONF-34584 - Getting issue details... STATUS . You may need to change the port manually in the server.xml.
Using Confluence Data Center?
Confluence Data Center 5.7.x contains known issues that can impact the stability of your cluster.
We strongly recommend only installing, or upgrading to, Confluence Data Center 5.8.5 or later.
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. 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 can't solve it, please create a support ticket and one of our support engineers will help you.