Here are some important notes on upgrading to Confluence 7.17. For details of the new features and improvements in this release, see the Confluence 7.17 Release Notes. 

Upgrade notes 

Upgrading to 7.17.4

Due to changes required for  CONFSERVER-78179 - Getting issue details... STATUS in Confluence 7.17.4, 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. 

Configuring Confluence as an OAuth 2.0 provider

You can now configure Confluence as an OAuth 2.0 client and provider. If you’d like to switch to OAuth 2.0, you’ll need to update your current integrations that use OAuth 1.0 or build new ones compatible with Confluence. To understand what OAuth 2.0 flows are available and what data you need, see the Confluence OAuth 2.0 provider API.

If your integrations are ready to go, learn how to link to other applications.

Change to JMX monitoring

You can now turn JMX monitoring off from the Monitoring page. Previously this was done using the confluence.jmx.disabled system property. 

You won't be able to enable JMX monitoring through the UI on any nodes that have this system property set. 

If you prefer to keep JMX monitoring disabled, we still recommend removing the system property, and instead using the UI to disable JMX. This will allow you to enable it in the future without needing to restart Confluence. 

Faster permissions service

You can now access the faster permissions service from the admin console. You should read the Faster permissions service documentation before enabling this service.

Minor improvements to calendar restrictions

We've made some small changes to the calendar restrictions dialog to make it easier to use and understand. The way restrictions work has not changed.  

Invalid license check

If a Confluence Data Center or Server license isn't valid, system administrators will now see a banner prompting them to contact their license issuer to confirm. 

Upgrading PostgreSQL on older sites

If your Confluence instance previously ran on PostgreSQL 8.x or earlier, it's possible that some of your tables were created with Unique Object Identifiers (OIDs). PostgreSQL 12 removed the special behavior of OID columns.

To avoid problems when upgrading your database, see How to check for unique object identifiers (OIDs) before upgrading to PostgreSQL 12 or later.

Supported platform changes

Added support for PostgreSQL 12, 13, and 14. 

End of support announcements

End of support for Microsoft SQL Server 2016

As previously announced, Microsoft SQL Server 2016 is no longer supported.

Advance Notice: End of support for PostgreSQL 10

Confluence 7.17.x will be the last release to support PostgreSQL 10.

Advance Notice: Removal of Usage stats 

We will remove the Usage Stats feature in Confluence 8.0. 

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

Infrastructure changes 

Head to Preparing for Confluence 7.17 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 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.