Here are some important notes on upgrading to Confluence 7.2. For details of the new features and improvements in this release, see the Confluence 7.2 Release Notes. 

Using Companion app in single sign-on environments

If you've configured single sign-on (SSO) in such a way that your reverse proxy redirects the requests to your SSO gateway, and only successfully authenticated requests ever reach Confluence, your users won't have been able to use Atlassian Companion app. This is because the Atlassian Companion app uses JWT tokens to authenticate requests, and only Confluence can authenticate these requests, not your SSO authenticator. 

To make sure requests from the Atlassian Companion app can be authenticated, you can now configure your reverse proxy to always allow requests from the following URLs: 

• <base-url>/rest/token-auth/api/* 
• <base-url>/download/token-auth/attachments/*
• <base-url>/plugins/servlet/imgFilter*  
• <base-url>/rest/analytics/1.0/publish/bulk   (this is only necessary if you have opted in to data collection)

If an unauthenticated user tries to access these URLs directly, they would be redirected to the Confluence login screen. They wouldn't be able to access any content or download files while unauthenticated.

Chart macro maximum size

We now limit the maximum height and width of the Chart macro. This will help avoid performance problems if a user accidentally enters a very large value, as we'll automatically resize the chart to 3000px by 3000px. You can modify the default maximum using the  following system properties:

• confluence.chart.macro.width.max  
• confluence.chart.macro.height.max 

Changes to Data Center clustering

As mentioned in the release notes, you can now choose to deploy Data Center as a standalone (non-clustered) installation. If you're currently running Confluence Data Center in a cluster, there's no need to do anything. If you'd prefer to make the switch to a standalone setup, you can follow the process described in Adding and Removing Data Center nodes. 

Minor change to Lucene implementation

We've made a change to the implementation of the term filter. A bitset is now only created when the number of matches is large enough to benefit from it. This helps reducing unnecessary CPU and memory usage and avoid bottlenecks. The threshold can be changed via the confluence.search.lucene.termFilterBitSetThreshold system property, but we don't expect you should need to do this. 

MySQL 8

We've added support for MySQL 8.  If you plan to upgrade, you should upgrade Confluence first, then upgrade your database.  

You'll need to switch to the latest database driver, see Database JDBC Drivers.  If you use a datasource connection you'll also need to update the driver classname to com.mysql.cj.jdbc.Driver. 

Upgrade task to remove temporary files

When files are added to a page via the REST API an attachment-*.tmp temporary file is created in the <install-directory>/temp folder. To prevent this temp directory from growing too large over time, we now clean up these temp files at the end of the REST request. 

We've also implemented an upgrade task to clean up these files when you upgrade to Confluence 7.2. The upgrade task could take some time in sites that have a large number of files in the <install-directory>/temp directory. 

Upgrading from 6.x or earlier

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

Upgrading from 6.3 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. 

Supported platforms changes

In this release we have:

• Added support for MySQL 8.

End of support announcements

Advance Notice: End of support for Internet Explorer 11

To allow us to continue to take advantage of modern web standards to deliver improved functionality and the best possible user experience across all of our products, we have decided to end support for Internet Explorer 11. 

Confluence 7.4.x (Enterprise Release) will be the last release to support Internet Explorer 11. 

Advance Notice: End of support for several databases 

Confluence 7.3.x will be the last release to support the following databases:

• PostgreSQL 9.4
• MySQL 5.6 
• Oracle 12c R1
• Microsoft SQL Server 2012

Confluence 7.4.x (Enterprise Release) will be the last release to support the following databases:

• Microsoft SQL Server 2014
• PostgreSQL 9.5

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

Infrastructure changes 

Head to Preparing for Confluence 7.2 to find out more about changes under the hood. 

Known issues

• Some plugins will not work with Confluence 7.2 running on MySQL 8. See CONFSERVER-59391.
• There's a known issue in JavaMail 1.6.2 which may affect you if you set up your mail server in the server.xml. See CONFSERVER-59040.
• Users can't edit files using the Atlassian Companion app in some browsers. See Can’t edit files in Confluence Server using Atlassian Companion app in Internet Explorer, Edge, Firefox, or Safari
• Synchrony will not start on Windows with AdoptOpenJDK jdk8u212.  See CONFSERVER-58784) for a workaround.
• 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. 
• There is a known issue where the "hibernate dialect" property was being incorrectly retained after upgrade. Customers who have been using Confluence since version 2.4 or earlier (legends!) should check the hibernate dialect in their <confluence-home>/confluence.cfg.xml file before upgrading to Confluence 6.x to avoid this error: Upgrading fails with ERROR The size (16777215) given to the column 'event' exceeds the maximum allowed for any data type (8000) in Confluence.
• There is a known issue when upgrading Confluence with an Oracle database. Oracle users should upgrade their driver to 12.2.0.x before upgrading to Confluence 6.1 or later. See Upgrade to version 6.1.x Failed With Error "ORA-01000: maximum open cursors exceeded" for more information. 

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

Note: Upgrade to a test environment first. Test your upgrades in your test environment before rolling them into production.

If you're already running a version of Confluence, please follow these instructions to upgrade to the latest version:

1. Go to > Support Tools > Health Check to check your license validity, application server, database setup and more.
2. Before you upgrade, we strongly recommend that you back up your installation directory, home directory and database.
3. If your version of Confluence is earlier than 7.0, read the release notes and upgrade guides for all releases between your version and the latest version.
4. Download the latest version of Confluence.
5. Follow the instructions in the Upgrade Guide.
6. Use the Confluence Post-Upgrade Checks to ensure that everything works as expected.

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.