Here are some important notes on upgrading to Confluence 7.3. For details of the new features and improvements in this release, see the Confluence 7.3 Release Notes. 

Latest Companion App required

We've made significant changes to how you edit files using Atlassian Companion. When you upgrade to Confluence 7.3, you'll need to make sure your users are also running the latest version of Companion App (1.0.0 or later).  

Earlier versions (0.6.2 and earlier) will not work with Confluence 7.3. 

PostgreSQL 10 support

We've added support for PostgreSQL 10.  If you plan to upgrade, you should upgrade Confluence first, then upgrade your database.  

See pg-upgrade in the PostgreSQL 10 documentation for information on how to upgrade your database. Make sure you back up your database, Confluence installation directory and Confluence home directory before you begin. We strongly recommend you test your changes in a staging environment first. 

After upgrading, we recommend you run ANALYZE. Analyze collects statistics about contents of tables in the database, which the query planner can use to help determine the most efficient execution plans for queries.

There's also a known issue where Confluence won't start with PostgreSQL 10 in Amazon RDS. See  CONFSERVER-59243 - Getting issue details... STATUS  for more information and a workaround. 

Oracle 19c support

We've added support for Oracle 19c.  If you plan to upgrade, you should upgrade Confluence first, then upgrade your database.  

See Database Upgrade Guide in the Oracle 19c documentation for information on how to upgrade your database. Make sure you back up your database, Confluence installation directory and Confluence home directory before you begin. We strongly recommend you test your changes in a staging environment first. 

We've tested Oracle 19c with both the ojdbc8.jar and ojdbc10.jar drivers. 

Emoji support for MySQL

We have added support for utf8mb4 collation for MySQL 5.7 and 8.0. This will allow people to use 4-byte UTF-8 characters in Confluence pages. 

If you're running MySQL 5.7 or 8.0, and you're ready to migrate your database to use utf8mb4 collation, see How to Fix the Collation and Character Set of a MySQL Database. There are some things you need to know before you start:

• Back up your database first. We also strongly recommend testing the migration in a test site, as migrating the tables may take some time for large databases.
• If you're running MySQL 5.7, you'll need version 5.7.9 or later. 

• You'll need to check the character set specified in the my.cnf  or my.ini  file on your MySQL Server. If character_set_server  is not set to utf8mb4, and you can't change this (for example if it is required for a database used by another application) you may need to add the connectionCollation=utf8mb4_bin parameter to your connection URL.  See the Connector/J 8.0 or Connector/J 5.1 documentation for more information. 
  
  

  Show me how to do this...

  1. Stop Confluence

  2. Edit the <local-home>/confluence.cfg.xml  file

  3. Update the following line to add the connectionCollation=utf8mb4_bin  parameter to your database connection URL, as in the example below. 

  <property name="hibernate.connection.url">jdbc:mysql://yourhost:3306/confluence?connectionCollation=utf8mb4_bin</property>

  4. Restart Confluence. 

If you're running MySQL 5.6, you will need to upgrade to MySQL 5.7.9 or later, or to 8.0.x, and then migrate your database to utfmb4. If you're not able to upgrade MySQL at this time, you should continue to use utf8. If a 4-byte character is used we'll prompt the user to remove the character before they can save, preventing encoding problems. As Confluence 7.3 is the last version to support MySQL 5.6, it's a good time to start planning your upgrade. 

MySQL health check problem

There is also a known issue with Atlassian Troubleshooting and Support Tools, where some MySQL health checks always fail. We recommend updating the Atlassian Troubleshooting and Support tools plugin to version 1.23.2 or later to avoid this problem. 

Known issues with Inspect Permissions and People who can view

In Confluence 7.3.0 to 7.3.3, the Inspect permissions and People who can view features don't currently take into account some external directory and nested group scenarios. 

See Inspect Permissions returns incorrect information in Confluence 7.3 for a detailed summary of each scenario. 

If your site is impacted by these problems, we suggest you temporarily disable the Inspect Permissions - Gatekeeper system plugin that provides these features until we can provide a fix, to prevent users relying on inaccurate information. See  CONFSERVER-59513 - Getting issue details... STATUS

Ultimate Permission Manager app

If you currently use the Meta-Inf Ultimate Permission Manager app, that was acquired by Atlassian, there's some things you need to know before you upgrade. 

• If you have a Confluence Data Center license, when you upgrade to Confluence 7.3, the Ultimate Permission Manager app will be disabled automatically. This is intentional, so we can give you access to "Inspect permissions" and "People who can view", which are the equivalent features in Confluence Data Center. 
• If you have a Confluence Server license, when you upgrade to Confluence 7.3, you'll be able to continue to use the Ultimate Permission Manager app until your app license expires. You won't see the new "People who can view" option, but will use the equivalent feature provided by the app. 
• If you have a Confluence Server license, and your Ultimate Permission Manager app license has expired, we recommend you disable or uninstall the Ultimate Permission Manager app, in order to get access to the "People who can view" feature provided by Confluence Server. 

Disable People who can view

If you currently hide the People directory, or other places where users may be able to see a list of other users, you may not want the People who can view feature. To disable it for your whole site:

1. Go to <base-url>/admin/plugins/gatekeeper-plugin/global/configuration.action
2. Deselect the Allow who can view option and save the change. 

Show all pages in the page tree

In the sidebar, we now load a maximum of 200 pages at each level of the page hierarchy. A Show all pages button will appear if there are pages that have not been loaded. This change was made to improve your site performance. 

Disable legacy Edit in Office dark feature

If you previously enabled the legacy Edit in Office functionality, you will need to remove the dark feature flag in order to try our improved Companion app experience. 

To remove the dark feature flag, go to <base-url>/admin/darkfeatures.action and click Remove next to enable.legacy.edit.in.office. 

Enable Edit in Office in the Confluence UI

If you're unable to use Companion app, you can now enable the legacy Edit in Office functionality from the Confluence UI (previously this was done using a dark feature flag).  Go to General Configuration > Office Connector. 

Java 11 now bundled

In this release we've bundled the AdoptOpenJDK 11 JRE. This JRE is used when you install or upgrade Confluence using the installer. If you've installed Confluence manually you can either continue to use Java 8 or switch to Java 11. See Change the Java vendor or version Confluence uses to find out how to switch your Java version.

Some of the Java arguments used in our setenv.sh  / setenv.bat  files are no longer recognised in Java 11. Make sure you apply any customizations manually when you upgrade, don't simply copy over your old setenv file (or existing Java options if you run Confluence as a service). 

-XX:-PrintGCDetails -XX:+PrintGCDateStamps -XX:-PrintTenuringDistribution -Xloggc:$LOGBASEABS/logs/gc-`date +%F_%H-%M-%S`.log -XX:+UseGCLogFileRotation -XX:NumberOfGCLogFiles=5 -XX:GCLogFileSize=2M
-Djava.locale.providers=COMPAT,SPI 

-Xlog:gc+age=debug:file="%atlassian_logsdir%\gc-%atlassian_timestamp%.log"::filecount=5,filesize=2M
-Djava.locale.providers=JRE,SPI,CLDR

-XX:+IgnoreUnrecognizedVMOptions 
-Djdk.tls.server.protocols=TLSv1.1,TLSv1.2 
-Djdk.tls.client.protocols=TLSv1.1,TLSv1.2    

If you have added additional arguments, you may need to check that these are still available in Java 11, as they may cause errors when you start Confluence. 

Change to Universal Plugin Manager (UPM)

Updated 31 Aug 2020 

From Confluence 7.3 you can no longer disable many system apps, or app modules. These system apps are required for Confluence to operate properly, and can cause problems when disabled. 

Waiting for the next Long Term Support release?

Confluence 7.4 will be the next Long Term Support release. See the announcement on Atlassian Community.

Upgrading from 6.x

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:

• PostgreSQL 10.
• Oracle 19c.

Reminder about operating system support

Microsoft ended support for Windows 7 on January 14. You should only install and use Confluence on operating system versions that have active vendor support.

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 (Long Term Support 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 (Long Term Support 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 7.3 to find out more about changes under the hood. 

Known issues

• 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.
• Inspect Permissions does not work correctly with nested groups. See CONFSERVER-59513.
• 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 7.2, 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.