Confluence 6.8 Upgrade Notes
Here are some important notes on upgrading to Confluence 6.8. For details of the new features and improvements in this release, see the Confluence 6.8 Release Notes.
Upgrade notes
Confluence 6 is a major upgrade
If you're upgrading from Confluence 5.x, be sure to read these upgrade notes thoroughly, take a full backup, and test your upgrade in a non-production environment before upgrading your production site.
Ready for mobile?
We know many of you are super excited to get your teams using the mobile app. Here's a few points to help you have a smooth journey.
- Your site must use HTTPS. You won't be able to connect to the app via HTTP.
- Your certificate must be from a trusted Certificate Authority. You can't use a self-signed certificate, or one issued by your own CA.
- Your proxy must allow TLS 1.2 traffic (most do by default, but it's good to check your configuration), or iOS users won't be able to use the app.
- We've updated the
web.xml. If you've modified this file, re-apply your changes them to the new file, don't copy your old file over, or mobile won't work. - If your site is not accessible on the public internet, people will need to be connected to your network or VPN when using the app.
Head to Confluence Mobile for all the things you'll need to consider. Once your upgrade is done, Invite your team to use the app!
Did you participate in the mobile app beta?
First of all, thank you! 
Your feedback was invaluable to us. To keep using the app, however, you'll need to:
- Upgrade your site to Confluence 6.8 or later, and
- Update your app to version 1.x or later:
- For Android, head to the Play store and hit Update.
- For iOS, we recommend deleting the beta app from your device and then installing the official app from the App store.
If users update the app without upgrading Confluence, the app will still work for a while, but they won't get access to new features, like push notifications. Also, once logged out, you can't log back in, as the app checks for the required Confluence version.
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.
Upgrading from Confluence 5.x?
Collaborative editing is made possible by the magic of Synchrony. When you install Confluence Server, Synchrony will be configured to run as a separate process on your server.
If you're upgrading from Confluence 5.x, there are a few requirements you need to be aware of:
Infrastructure changes
For developers
Head to Preparing for Confluence 6.8 to find out more about changes under the hood.
End of support announcements
As previously announced, PostgreSQL 9.2 is no longer supported.
Known issues
- 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 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.
- There is a known issue where the "hibernate dialect" property was being incorrectly retained after upgrade. Customers who have been using Confluence since version 2.4 or earlier (legends!) should check the hibernate dialect in their
<confluence-home>/confluence.cfg.xmlfile before upgrading to Confluence 6.x to avoid this error: Upgrading fails with ERROR The size (16777215) given to the column 'event' exceeds the maximum allowed for any data type (8000) in Confluence. - There is a known issue when upgrading Confluence with an Oracle database. Oracle users should upgrade their driver to 12.2.0.x before upgrading to Confluence 6.1 or later. See Upgrade to version 6.1.x Failed With Error "ORA-01000: maximum open cursors exceeded" 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 > 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 6.5, 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.
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.