Confluence 7.8 Upgrade Notes
Here are some important notes on upgrading to Confluence 7.8. For details of the new features and improvements in this release, see the Confluence 7.8 Release Notes.
On this page:
Upgrade notes
Cannot upgrade to 7.8.0 directly if you use the H2 database
In this release we've upgraded the embedded H2 database, which is often used when evaluating Confluence. This is a significant upgrade which contains some breaking changes.
If you attempt to upgrade a Confluence site running on the embedded H2 database, the upgrade will fail and your site will not be accessible until you roll back the upgrade. We recommend you check your database before upgrading, as rolling back can take considerable effort.
Check whether you are using H2
To check whether you're using the embedded database go to Administration 
> General Configuration > Troubleshooting and support tools and make sure the database health checks are passing. If you are using the H2 database, the Embedded database check will fail.
Alternatively you can go to Administration > General Configuration > System Information and check the Database name row.
Migrate your data to a supported database
If you are using H2 in production, you will need to migrate to a supported external database before upgrading to Confluence 7.8.
See Migrating to Another Database for a step by step guide.
Word and Excel conversion now handled by the external process pool
For: DATA CENTER
In Confluence Data Center, many memory and CPU intensive tasks are handled by the external process pool.
From Confluence 7.8, the HTML conversion that's required to display a Word or Excel file using the Office Word and Office Excel macros (provided by the Office Connector) will be handled by the external process pool.
End of support announcements
No end of support announcements at this time.
Infrastructure changes
Head to Preparing for Confluence 7.8 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.
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:
- 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 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.