Here are some important notes on upgrading to Confluence 7.14. For details of the new features and improvements in this release, see the Confluence 7.14 Release Notes. 

Upgrade notes 

Upgrading to 7.14.3

Due to changes required for  CONFSERVER-78179 - Getting issue details... STATUS in Confluence 7.14.3, 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. 

Deleted date now appears in trash

We now store the date an item is deleted, and display it in the trash screen. We hope this will help space admins make confident decisions about purging the trash. 

Because we didn't previously store the deleted date, any page or file already in the trash at the point you upgrade will get the upgrade date as its deleted date. We decided that this would be safer than trying to derive a date from the data we had available, such as created or modified date. 

Similarly, if you import a space from an older Confluence version, we'll use the import date for any items that were in the trash at the point the space was exported to XML. 

Changed connection pool provider

As part of our work to resolve some performance issues, we have changed the default connection pool provider from c3p0 to Hikari. An upgrade task will make the required changes. Both c3p0 and Hikari properties will remain in your confluence.cfg.xml file for now. After upgrading, Confluence will continue to use c3p0 until you restart. From that point onwards, it will use Hikari by default. 

If you previously specified a different provider in the hibernate.connection.provider_class property (in confluence.cfg.xml), we won't change your current configuration. However, if after upgrading you would like to switch to Hikari, you can update the following in the  <local-home>/confluence.cfg.xml file. 

<property name="hibernate.connection.provider_class">com.atlassian.confluence.impl.hibernate.DelegatingHikariConnectionProvider</property>
<property name="hibernate.hikari.idleTimeout">30000</property>
<property name="hibernate.hikari.maximumPoolSize">60</property>
<property name="hibernate.hikari.minimumIdle">20</property>
<property name="hibernate.hikari.registerMbeans">true</property>

There's a known issue on PostgreSQL where you may see the following error in your logs on startup. You can safely ignore this warning, this will be resolved in a future release. 

WARN [Catalina-utility-1] [zaxxer.hikari.pool.ProxyConnection] checkException HikariPool-1 - Connection org.postgresql.jdbc.PgConnection@907892d marked as broken because of SQLSTATE(0A000), ErrorCode(0)
java.sql.SQLFeatureNotSupportedException: Method org.postgresql.jdbc.PgConnection.createClob() is not yet implemented.

Data pipeline next export date display problem

There's a known issue where the next export date does not display correctly after the first scheduled export. The next export will still happen at the scheduled time. A fix for this issue should be available in 7.14.1. See  CONFSERVER-69246 - Getting issue details... STATUS  for details. 

Supported Platforms changes

As previously announced, the following database is no longer supported:

• PostgreSQL 9.6.

End of support announcements

No new end of support announcements. 

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

Infrastructure changes 

Head to Preparing for Confluence 7.14 to find out more about changes under the hood. 

Known issues

• There is a known issue with Confluence 7.14 to 7.19 running in Linux with Java 8 where file descriptors unexpectedly remain open. We recommend changing from Java 8 to Java 11 to mitigate the issue, or upgrading to Confluence 7.19.7, which contains a fix for this issue, if Java 8 is required. See CONFSERVER-80171 to learn more about this issue.
• 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  > 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  > 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.