Here are some important notes on upgrading to Confluence 7.13. For details of the new features and improvements in this release, see the Confluence 7.13 Release Notes. 

Upgrade notes

Confluence Server and Data Center 7.13 is a Long Term Support release
This means we'll provide bug fix releases until 7.13 reaches end of life, to address critical security, stability, data integrity, and performance issues. 

Reconcile Unknown Attachments app is now bundled with Confluence

Updated 04 Jan 2023 

Track and fix pages with broken or missing attachments easily with the Reconcile Unknown Attachments app, now pre-installed with Confluence. Any page that contains an unknown attachment will have the unrestored-unknown-attachment label added to it. Remove this label after you have edited and repaired the attachment.

If you're using Confluence 7.12.x and earlier, download the app at Atlassian Marketplace.

Upgrading to 7.13.7

Due to changes required for  CONFSERVER-78179 - Getting issue details... STATUS in Confluence 7.13.7, you won't be able to perform a rolling upgrade to this version. Downtime will be required. 

You must wait for node 1 to start completely after upgrading before you attempt to start the next node, or Confluence will fail to start with an 'Unexpected bytes from remote node' error. If this happens, restart your first node. 

It is always good practice to wait for a node to start up completely before starting the next node. 

AdoptOpenJDK is now Adoptium OpenJDK

AdoptOpenJDK is now known as Eclipse Adoptium. Read more in AdoptOpenJDK to join the Eclipse Foundation.

You can run Confluence with supported versions of AdoptOpenJDK (Hotspot) or Adoptium OpenJDK (Eclipse Temurin). To keep things short, we plan to refer to this as "Adoptium OpenJDK" in our documentation. 

Known issue with Java 11 garbage collection logging 

There's a known issue with Java 11 GC logging settings that can result in unexpected log formats. See  CONFSERVER-61415 - Getting issue details... STATUS  for details. 

As a workaround, you should comment out the affected line in your setenv file as follows.  

::set CATALINA_OPTS=-Xloggc:"%atlassian_logsdir%\gc-%atlassian_timestamp%.log" -XX:+UseGCLogFileRotation -XX:NumberOfGCLogFiles=5 -XX:GCLogFileSize=2M %CATALINA_OPTS%

#CATALINA_OPTS="-Xloggc:$LOGBASEABS/logs/gc-`date +%F_%H-%M-%S`.log -XX:+UseGCLogFileRotation -XX:NumberOfGCLogFiles=5 -XX:GCLogFileSize=2M ${CATALINA_OPTS}"

It's worth noting that the layout of the setenv file changed in Confluence 7.12. Follow this guide to migrate your customizations over to the new file. 

How to migrate your setenv settings for Confluence 7.12 and later

Upgrading from 7.4

There have been some significant changes since the last LTS release that you should be aware of before upgrading, including: 

• change to the setenv.sh and setenv.bat files to make it easier to manage customizations
• splitting some log entries out into their own files for easier troubleshooting
• search index has been split into two files for better performance
• change to audit log format
• access logging enabled by default
• and much more. 

Some of these changes involve upgrade tasks that may take some time on large instances. Check out the Confluence 7.13 Long Term Support release Change Log for a roll-up of changes since 7.4, and be sure to read the upgrade notes for all versions between your current version and 7.13.  

Upgrading from 6.x

Custom plugins and integrations

If you're upgrading from Confluence 6.x and you've built your own plugins and integrations, be aware that Confluence 7.0 contained significant changes that might affect your plugins. 

We recommend you review the following developer resources, and test your custom plugins thoroughly before upgrading to Confluence 7.13 in production. 

• Preparing for Confluence 7.0
• Confluence 7.0 developer guide
• Atlassian User Interface upgrade guide
• Deprecated code paths removed in 7.0

JNDI mail server configuration

If you set up your mail server using a JNDI location (in the server.xml ), there are now two additional jar files that you'll need to move from <confluence-install>\confluence\WEB-INF\lib to <confluence-install>\lib : 

• javax.activation-x.x.x.jar
• javax.activation-api-1.2.0.jar

Space directory issue

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. 

End of support announcements

End of support for Microsoft Edge Legacy

As previously announced, we no longer support Microsoft Edge Legacy.

Advance Notice: End of support for PostgreSQL 9.6

Confluence 7.13.x will be the last release to support the following database:

• PostgreSQL 9.6

See End of Support Announcements for Confluence for more information.

Infrastructure changes 

Head to Preparing for Confluence 7.13 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 are a number of known issues when upgrading Confluence on specific database versions. See Confluence 7.11 upgrade notes if you are upgrading from Confluence 7.10 or earlier.
• 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 confluence-init.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.