Here are some important notes on upgrading to Confluence 7.11. For details of the new features and improvements in this release, see the Confluence 7.11 Release Notes. 

Upgrade notes 

Changes to the Page Index macro 

The Page Index macro can be quite memory hungry in large spaces. To prevent it causing out of memory errors in your site, the macro won't list any pages if there are more than 1000 in the space. This limit can be increased or decreased using the page.index.macro.max.pages system property. 

Access logs enabled by default

Access logging is now enabled by default from Confluence 7.11.  You can find the access logs in the <install-directory>/logs directory. The logs use the Tomcat Access Log Valve, and are retained for 30 days. To increase this, change the maxDays attribute in the <install-directory>/conf/server.xml file. 

You may need to allow some additional disk space to cater for the additional log files, particularly if you've got a big, busy site, and want to retain logs for more than 30 days. 

If you've previously enabled access logging using Tomcat valve, you'll find that our recommended log pattern has changed. Consider using our new format, which is easier to read and contains more information. 

pattern="%t %{X-AUSERNAME}o %I %h %r %s %Dms %b %{Referer}i %{User-Agent}i"

Changes to the application log files

Currently, most log entries are written to the application log file (atlassian-confluence.log), which can be difficult to parse, and can rotate too quickly when you're attempting to troubleshoot a problem. To help with this, some entries will now be written to the following separate log files, in the same directory. 

• atlassian-confluence-index.log contains events related to the search index.
• atlassian-confluence-outgoing-mail.log contains events related to outgoing mail, such as notifications.
• atlassian-confluence-security.log contains events related to your users and user directories.

This should make troubleshooting problems significantly easier. If you send your logs to a third party tool for easier access and analysis, you may need to update your config to include these new files. 

You can check the exact classes or packages that are logged to each file in the log4j.properties file under LOGGING LOCATION AND APPENDER. 

You can also set these packages to additionally send log entries to the atlassian-confluence.log.

Changes to the allowlist

When you create an application link, the URL is automatically added to the Confluence allowlist. From Confluence 7.11, outbound requests from these URLs require users to be authenticated, unless you specifically allow anonymous users .

In addition, you can also set the default allowlist behaviour for all application links. Choose to allow all users (including anonymous), only authenticated users, or deny all outbound requests for all users. When a new application link is created, the URL will be added to the allowlist with your preferred setting already configured. 

If you experience any issues with features that rely on application links, such as gadgets, you can choose to allow anonymous requests for that application link. This is less secure, but may be a useful workaround until you can make any required changes to your linked application for authenticated requests. If you are in this situation, consider using an exact URL or wildcard rule to limit access to only the required path or resources. 

If you subscribe a third-party gadget, that doesn't require an application link, you will now need to add the gadget URL to the allowlist. 

Review data retention and rate limiting settings for analytics

If you have Confluence Data Center, we recommend you review the default analytics data retention settings to make sure they're appropriate for your site. Analytics data is stored in the database, and will grow as people use your site. To prevent database tables growing too large (which can increase your backup time, or result in reports taking a long time to load) we have put in place some limits, which you can change to suit the size and usage levels of your site.

• Analytics data is retained in the database for 12 months, up to a maximum of 20 million records. Confluence will regularly delete any records that exceed this limit, starting with the oldest records. Records are deleted in batches of 10,000 so the total number of records retained may be less than the limit you set.
• A maximum of 3 reports can be generated simultaneously. This means if four people attempt to load an analytics report at exactly the same time, the fourth will get a message to try again in a minute. As soon as a report loads, the next one can be generated. 
• Generating a report will time out after 1000 seconds. 

Go to  Administration menu , then General Configuration > Confluence Analytics > Configuration to review, and change these limits if necessary.

Translations for Analytics

In Confluence 7.11, analytics screens will only be available in English. Translations in all our bundled languages will be available in Confluence 7.12.  Apologies for the delay.  

GoodSoftware Analytics for Confluence app

If you previously used the Good Software Analytics for Confluence app, that was acquired by Atlassian, and have a Confluence Data Center license, when you upgrade to Confluence 7.11, the app will be replaced by the bundled version.

We have changed the way you grant global permissions to view analytics to make it handle a large number of groups. If you have limited analytics to specific groups, you'll need to make a note of the groups before upgrading, as you'll need to manually re-select these groups in the permissions screen after upgrading. 

If you have a Confluence Server license, when you upgrade to Confluence 7.11, you'll be able to continue to access analytics until your Analytics for Confluence app license expires. After that time, if you want to continue to access analytics you'll need to migrate to Data Center. 

Upgrade will fail with Oracle 12c R1

This release contains changes that will cause your upgrade to fail with the following error when running on Oracle 12c Release 1. 

Configuring database failed
StatementCallback; bad SQL grammar [ALTER TABLE DENORMALISED_SPACE_CHANGE_LOG MODIFY (ID DEFAULT DENORMALISED_SPACE_CHANGE_LOG_SEQ.NEXTVAL)]; nested exception is java.sql.SQLSyntaxErrorException: ORA-00972: identifier is too long
Setting up database instance failed. You can either try it again or or go back to the database selection page

We ended support for Oracle 12c R1 in Confluence 7.4, so make sure you're running a supported version of Oracle before upgrading to Confluence 7.11. 

Upgrade will fail on some Microsoft SQL Server 2016 versions

This release contains changes that will cause your upgrade to fail with the following error when running on Microsoft SQL Server 2016 and earlier unsupported versions. 

Upgrade failed, application will not start: Upgrade task com.atlassian.confluence.upgrade.upgradetask.DenormalisedSpacePermissionsUpgradeTask@867e592
failed during the SCHEMA_UPGRADE phase due to: 
StatementCallback; bad SQL grammar [CREATE OR ALTER FUNCTION
dbo.space_function_for_denormalised_permissions()

This is due to the syntax only being supported in Microsoft SQL Server 2016 Service Pack 1 or later. If you're still running Microsoft SQL Server 2016, make sure you have Service Pack 1 or later before attempting to upgrade to Confluence 7.11. 

Upgrade may fail on MySQL 8

This release contains changes that may cause your upgrade to fail with the following error when running on MySQL 8. 

ERROR [Catalina-utility-1] [atlassian.confluence.plugin.PluginFrameworkContextListener] launchUpgrades Upgrade failed, application will not start: Upgrade task com.atlassian.confluence.upgrade.upgradetask.DenormalisedSpacePermissionsUpgradeTask@c8e620 failed during the SCHEMA_UPGRADE phase
...
You do not have the SUPER privilege and binary logging is enabled (you *might* want to use the less safe log_bin_trust_function_creators variable)

To resolve this problem, you will need to specify the following parameter in the [mysqld] section of your my.cnf  file.

log-bin-trust-function-creators = 1

See Install/Upgrade Confluence 7.11+ fails with error - You do not have the SUPER privilege and binary logging is enabled for more information. 

Change to MySQL database backup requirement

If you use MySQL you'll need to make a change to your backup procedures to avoid problems starting Confluence in the event you need to restore a database backup.  

When backing up your MySQL database, make sure you include --routines or -R in the mysqldump command so that all required stored procedures and functions are included in the backup.  For example:

mysqldump -p db_name --routines > db_backup.sql
# or
mysqldump -p db_name -R > db_backup.sql

For more information see Confluence MySQL database migration causes content_procedure_for_denormalised_permissions does not exist error

Page history is not renumbered when versions are deleted

There's a known issue in Confluence 7.11.0 and 7.11.1 where page history versions are not renumbered when a version is deleted. This change is related to an upcoming piece of work, and may cause problems if you have created your own scripts to interact with page history. See CONFSERVER-61228 - Getting issue details... STATUS for more information.

End of support announcements

Advance Notice: End of support for Microsoft Edge Legacy

In January 2020 Microsoft released a new Microsoft Edge browser based on Chromium. As Microsoft have announced plans to end support for Microsoft Edge Legacy, we have also decided to end support for Microsoft Edge Legacy.

Confluence 7.12.x will be the last release to support Microsoft Edge Legacy. 

For more information on all of these notices, see End of Support Announcements for Confluence. 

Infrastructure changes 

Head to Preparing for Confluence 7.11 to find out more about changes under the hood. 

Known issues

• There is a known issue when running Confluence with MySQL 8.0.29 and later due to a change to the UTF8 alias in MySQL. We're working on a fix, but if you have Confluence 7.3 or later, you can change the character set and collation to UTF8MB4 to avoid this issue. See How to Fix the Collation and Character Set of a MySQL Database manually.
• There is a known issue where upgrading Confluence on Microsoft SQL Server fails with an 'invalid column name error. See CONFSERVER-66547 for a workaround. 
• There's a known issue running PostgreSQL on Azure with the bundled version of the driver (42.2.16). See CONFSERVER-60515 for a workaround

• If you are upgrading from Confluence 6.3 or earlier, there's a known issue where spaces do not appear in the space directory. You'll need to reindex your site after upgrading to fix this. 

• 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 read-only mode attempts to write to <shared-home>/confluence.cfg.xml , but the file doesn't exist in the shared home directory. This problem affects sites that have been previously upgraded from Confluence 6.0 or earlier. See Could not save access.mode into the shared confluence.cfg.xml file error after upgrading to Confluence Data Center 6.10
• 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. 

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.

Upgrade procedure

Always test the upgrade in a test environment before upgrading in production.

To upgrade Confluence to the latest version:

1. Go to Administration menu , then General Configuration > Plan your upgrade and select the version you want to upgrade to. This will run the pre-upgrade checks.
2. Go to Administration menu , then General Configuration > Troubleshooting and support tools to check your license validity, application server, database setup and more.
3. If your version of Confluence is more than one version behind, read the release notes and upgrade guides  for all releases between your version and the latest version.
4. Back up your installation directory, home directory and database.
5. Download the latest version of Confluence.
6. Follow the instructions in the Upgrade Guide.

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.