Confluence 8.1 Upgrade Notes
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
Changes to blog display
Available on Confluence 8.1.3 and later
To personalize the blogging experience, Confluence blogs will now reflect the user’s time zone instead of the browser or system default time zone. This change impacts the blog breadcrumbs, page tree and any newly created blog URLs:
- Blog breadcrumbs will feature the year, month, and day of page creation based on the user's time zone.
- Blogs will be grouped in the correct month and year in the page tree (sidebar) based on the user's time zone.
- Newly-created blog posts will have stable URLs like
/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=953065, instead of time-based URLs likedisplay/SPACEKEY/2023/02/28.
Users should check and set their time zones to take advantage of this change.
This change has been backported from Confluence 8.2.
Migration of attachment data
When you start up Confluence 8.1, we’ll migrate your attachment data to a new, robust folder structure. This change improves page move performance and stops images from breaking or "going missing" 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. If you intend on migrating your attachments to S3 object storage, you must wait for this migration task to finish first.
Before you upgrade, review your backup solution as this change can lead to additional storage consumption. For example, if your backup tool reads the migrated attachments in the new v4 folder structure as new data, you will end up with duplicates.
Learn more about the migration task and the new folder structure at 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 apps
Updated
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 plugins:
Confluence mail archiving (IMAP)
Confluence email to page (POP3 only)
Confluence reply to email (POP3 only)
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 to OAuth 2.0 in Space tools.
Screenshot: Mail Account settings with authentication dropdown menu
This property has been backported to Confluence 7.17 and later, including our Confluence 7.19 Long Term Support version.
We are still working on a way to provide OAuth 2.0 support to the Confluence email gateway app.
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.
- 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 menu
, then General Configuration. > Plan your upgrade and select the version you want to upgrade to. This will run the pre-upgrade checks. - Go to Administration menu , then 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.