Here are some important notes on upgrading to Confluence 7.19. For details of the new features and improvements in this release, see the Confluence 7.19 Release Notes. 

Upgrade notes

Confluence Server and Data Center 7.19 is a Long Term Support release
This means we'll provide bug fix releases until 7.19 reaches end of life, to address critical security, stability, data integrity, and performance issues. 

MS SQL Server JDBC Driver Upgrade in Confluence 7.19.27

The JDBC driver for MS SQL Server has been upgraded from version 7.4 to 12.6. If you are using SQL Server via JDBC and your database isn't configured for SSL connections, you must explicitly disable encryption in Confluence's connection URL string. With the updated driver, encryption is enabled by default. To disable it, append ;encrypt=false to the existing connection string. We recommend making this update before upgrading to avoid any downtime.

Check out how to locate the connection string

Changes to app uploads via the Universal Plugin Manager in Confluence 7.19.20

To enhance security, we’ve changed how Data Center products, including Confluence, handle app installation through the Universal Plugin Manager (UPM) and REST APIs. The Upload App button of UPM is now disabled by default. System admins can still enable app installation via two possible workarounds:

1. Re-enable the UI upload button and API. Setting the system property upm.plugin.upload.enabled to true. For security reasons, do not leave this setting on permanently. We recommend turning it off once plugin upload is complete.

2. Load custom plugins from your Confluence file system. Set the system atlassian.confluence.plugin.scan.directory to a target location of your custom plugins, which will be loaded into the system upon restart. We recommend a directory within the Confluence home directory, such as $CONFLUENCE_HOME/plugins/installed-plugins. Make sure you restart Confluence after setting this property.
   **If you run a Confluence cluster, a rolling restart is enough to pick up the configuration properties you set to enable the features. 

This change doesn’t affect the installation of apps from the Atlassian Marketplace. Note that the UPM upload option is still enabled for instances running in dev mode. 

For further details, visit Managing system and Marketplace apps. 

Enhance the security of your directory in Confluence 7.19.18

In this release, we've added documentation to help you increase the security of your tar.gz or zip file Confluence installations by providing an extra layer of permissions for your installation files and folders.

See the 'Enhance Directory Security' step in our installation guides for Windows and Linux to learn how to do this

Removal of Velocity servlet support in Confluence 7.19.18

Overview - Support for rendering URLs ending in .vm has been removed from this version. As a result, this functionality will stop working, and changes will be required.

Note that this doesn’t impact a plugin’s ability to utilize VM files inside actions.

Action Required - With the removal of Velocity servlet support in Confluence, affected plugins are now required to leverage Struts actions for serving Velocity template-based UI screens, which offer additional server rendering control and security features.

Upgrade your apps in 7.19.18 and later

When upgrading to Confluence 7.19.18 and later versions, ensure you've upgraded all of your apps to their latest versions. We've introduced some security changes in Confluence 7.19.18 that can cause compatibility issues with older app versions.

Learn how to upgrade your apps

Changes to Jira Issues Macro total count display

Available on Confluence 7.19.15 and later

Expect quicker load times when editing pages with many Jira Issue macros set to display the Total issues count. We've tweaked Jira Issues macro to cache the count when it's initially added to the editor, and again when it’s published, resulting in fewer calls made between Jira and Confluence.

To clear the cache and see the latest count within the editor, simply publish the page, then return to the editor. Refreshing the page in view mode will also clear the cached count.

This change has been backported from Confluence 8.6. Learn more about this bug

Changes to blog display

Available on Confluence 7.19.7 and later

To personalize the blogging experience, Confluence blogs will now reflect the user’s time zone instead of the browser or system default time zone. This change impacts the blog breadcrumbs, page tree and any newly created blog URLs:

• Blog breadcrumbs will feature the year, month, and day of page creation based on the user's time zone.
• Blogs will be grouped in the correct month and year in the page tree (sidebar) based on the user's time zone.
• Newly-created blog posts will have stable URLs like /pages/viewpage.action?pageId=953065, instead of time-based URLs like display/SPACEKEY/2023/02/28. 

Users should check and set their time zones to take advantage of this change.

This change has been backported from Confluence 8.2.

End of support announcements

Advance Notice: End of support for Oracle 12c

Confluence 7.20.x will be the last release to support Oracle 12c.

Advance Notice: End of support for the following databases:

• We will end support for MySQL 5.7 in Confluence 8.0.
• We will end support for PostgreSQL 11 in Confluence 8.0.
• We will end support for H2 embedded database in Confluence 8.0.

Advance Notice: End of support for Java 8

We will end support for running Confluence with Java 8 in Confluence 8.0.

Advance Notice: End of support for UTF8 encoding for MySQL

We will end support for UTF8 encoding for MySQL databases in Confluence 8.0. If you run Confluence with a MySQL database, you should use UTF8MB4 encoding.

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 7.19 to find out more about changes under the hood. 

Known issues

• There is a known issue where, after upgrading to Confluence 7.19.20 and using Java 8, Confluence nodes cannot cluster. We are working on a fix for this issue. See CONFSERVER-94970 to learn more about this issue.
• There is a known issue where Confluence 7.19.14 and Confluence 8.5.1 fail to start up or run correctly when running in old Linux versions that don’t have GLIBC_2.14 installed. To resolve this issue, upgrade to a supported Linux OS that has GLIBC_2.14 or newer bundled. See CONFSERVER-91652 to learn more about this issue
• 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 where the Task Report macro returns a timeout or error state when faster permissions is enabled. As a temporary fix, we will not use faster permissions on this macro in Confluence 7.19.2 and later.
• 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.
• 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.