Below are some important notes on upgrading to Confluence 5.8. For details of the new features and improvements in this release, please read the Confluence 5.8 Release Notes.

Note on version numbers: The first publicly available release for 5.8 is Confluence 5.8.2. Confluence 5.8 and 5.8.1 were internal releases. 

On this page:

Upgrade notes

Changes to page restrictions

You no longer need to add someone as an editor and viewer in the restrictions dialog.  We'll check if the person has edit permissions, and if they do, we'll let them see the page (it's a bit hard to edit a page you can't see, right?). Any child pages will also be visible, unless there are further view restrictions on the child pages.

This change applies to existing pages too, so anyone who previously couldn't see a page because they only had edit permission will now be able to see the page.
  

The way permissions are inherited on pages has not changed:

• If you restrict viewing to a person or group, they'll be able to see that page and all its child pages (unless there are further restrictions on the child pages)
• If you restrict editing to a person or group, they'll be able to see and edit that page, plus see its child pages (just the same as if you applied separate edit and view restrictions).
• Parent pages (higher up in the page hierarchy) can have their own view restrictions that may prevent people from viewing your page.

Visual changes in Confluence 5.8

We've made a small visual change in this release. The Restrictions, Labels and Location icons now appear in near the breadcrumbs in the editor (same location as when you're viewing a page). 

Changes to Tomcat datasource connection pooling

This is the first Confluence release to bundle Apache Tomcat 8, which embeds a version of Commons DBCP 2.x (previous Tomcat versions use DBCP 1.x). There's a couple of notable changes due to the DBCP version update:

• The maxActive configuration option has been renamed to maxTotal. (maxTotal defaults to a value of "8" if not explicitly set.)
• The maxWait configuration option has been renamed to maxWaitMillis

If you are using a datasource connection be sure to rename maxActive and maxWait when upgrading to Confluence 5.8.

If you're using a direct JDBC connection, you won't be affected by the Tomcat/DBCP change.

Changes that affect new installations

These changes only affect new installations of Confluence. If you're upgrading an existing Confluence site, these changes will not affect you. 

Default maximum attachment size

The maximum attachment size in all new installations will be 100mb by default. Confluence administrators can increase or decrease this size limit at Administration menu , then General Configuration.

New H2 embedded database

In this release we have switched to an embedded H2 database for new trial installations. The embedded database is provided for evaluating Confluence and is not supported when running Confluence in a production environment. 

If you're currently using the embedded HSQL database, you will be able to upgrade and continue to use HSQL, but we do recommend migrating to a supported external database if you're running Confluence in production.  If you're not sure whether you're still using the embedded database, go to Administration menu , then General Configuration > Atlassian Support Tools > Health Check. 

Install Confluence Questions and Team Calendars at the same time as Confluence

When you install Confluence for the first time you now have the option to also install Confluence Questions and Team Calendars automatically. This saves you extra steps if you've purchased a license bundle that includes a license for Questions and Team Calendars.

End of support announcements

• End of support for Java 7
  As previously announced, from this release onward we no longer support Java 7 (JRE and JDK 1.7)
• End of support for Tomcat 7
  As previously announced, we only support the version of Tomcat that is bundled with Confluence.
• Advance notice: End of support for Internet Explorer 9 
  Confluence 5.8.x will be the last release to support Internet Explorer 9 
• Advance notice: End of support for Oracle 11.1 and 11.2
  Confluence 5.8.x will be the last release to support Oracle 11.1 and 11.2
• Advance notice: End of support for Microsoft SQL 2008
  Confluence 5.8.x will be the last release to support Microsoft SQL 2008

• Advance notice: Plan to unbundle the documentation theme
  Confluence 5.8 will be the last release to bundle the documentation theme. If you are already using the theme, you'll be unaffected by this change. We will make the theme available on marketplace also. As previously announced we still plan to merge the documentation theme with the default theme in a future Confluence release, and will provide more information closer to that time.

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:

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 5.7, 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 .

Known issues

• There's a known issue related to setting up Confluence using the embedded H2 database on Mac OSX. See CONF-37625 - Getting issue details... STATUS  for more information and a workaround. 
• Some strings are not appearing in correct language. See  CONF-37718 - Getting issue details... STATUS

•   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. 

• Confluence Data Center 5.8.2 - 5.8.4 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.

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.