Here are some important notes on upgrading to Confluence 8.1. For details of the new features and improvements in this release, see the Confluence 8.1 Release Notes.

Upgrade notes

Migration of attachment data

When you start Confluence 8.1, we’ll migrate your attachment data to a new, robust folder structure. This new v4 directory will improve page move performance and stop images going missing or breaking during failed page moves. It's also expected to restore any attachments that were previously "lost" or broken during failed page moves.

Confluence will operate normally while this migration task runs in the background. You must wait for this migration task to finish first if you intend on migrating your attachments to S3 object storage.

To learn more about v4 or the migration task, see Hierarchical File System Attachment Storage.

Improved user experience when moving page trees

Speaking of moving pages, we’ve removed a misleading 3-minute timeout warning that appeared during high-volume page moves even if the pages actually moved after that period of time. It’s been replaced with a loading icon and a count of the seconds elapsed since the operation started – which will run until the pages have moved successfully. Oh, sweet closure.

Extending OAuth 2.0 support for mail plugins

Following Microsoft announcing end of life to basic authentication for Exchange Online by 31 December 2022, we’ve extended OAuth 2.0 support to the following mail server apps and will back port this functionality to Confluence 7.19 LTS:

• Confluence mail archiving

• Confluence email to page

• Confluence reply to email

• Confluence email gateway

If you use Microsoft Office Exchange on Confluence, you’ll need to configure a new outgoing link, and then update your mail account's authentication method in Space tools.

Screenshot: Mail Account settings with authentication dropdown menu

Supported platform changes

Support for Amazon S3 object storage

You can now store your attachments on S3 object storage. This is recommended for enterprises with large or increasing data needs to scale efficiently. You must be on the v4 hierarchical file system attachment storage before you configure S3 object storage.

See Supported Platforms for additional requirements.

End of support announcements

There are no advance announcements for end of support.

Infrastructure changes 

Head to Preparing for Confluence 8.1 to find out more about changes under the hood. 

Known issues

• 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.
  

• There is a known issue running PostgreSQL on Azure with the bundled version of the driver (42.2.16). See CONFSERVER-60515 for a workaround.

• There is a known issue when using Amazon S3 object storage where performing attachment-related tasks involving 49 or more attachments causes Confluence Data Center to become temporarily unresponsive or slow. Watch CONFSERVER-82499 to follow this issue.

• 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  > General Configuration > Plan your upgrade and select the version you want to upgrade to. This will run the pre-upgrade checks.
2. Go to  > 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 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.