Confluence 7.6 Upgrade Notes
Here are some important notes on upgrading to Confluence 7.6. For details of the new features and improvements in this release, see the Confluence 7.6 Release Notes.
On this page:
Upgrade notes
Unlocking Data Center potential
When clustered, Confluence generally uses a distributed cache, which means data is evenly partitioned across all the Confluence nodes in a cluster, instead of being replicated on each node.
In order to improve cluster resilience, and unlock further horizontal scaling capabilities, we have switched some specific caches to local caching with remote invalidation.
The default cache configuration in Confluence is still a fully-distributed cache, so these changes should not affect your plugins.
Changes to mobile login
The Confluence Server mobile app needs to check that you're running a compatible version of Confluence before it can log your users in. If you've configured a custom filter in your VPN or firewall to prevent unauthenticated requests to your server, Confluence can't perform this check. Previously the solution was to allow <confluence-base-url>/server-info.action and several headers and cookies.
From Confluence 7.6, you will only need to allow <confluence-base-url>/rest/nativemobile/1.0/info/login.
See 'Can't check compatibility' error in the Confluence Data Center and Server mobile app and Problems with logging in because of missing headers or cookies for more information.
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.
End of support announcements
No end of support announcements at this time.
Infrastructure changes
Head to Preparing for Confluence 7.6 to find out more about changes under the hood.
Known issues
- 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.
- 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.xmlfile 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
Always test the upgrade in a test environment before upgrading in production.
To upgrade Confluence to the latest version:
- Go to Administration
> General Configuration > Plan your upgrade and select the version you want to upgrade to. This will run the pre-upgrade checks. - Go to Administration > General Configuration > Troubleshooting and support tools to check your license validity, application server, database setup and more.
- 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.
- Back up your installation directory, home directory and database.
- Download the latest version of Confluence.
- 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.