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 like display/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.

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 05 Apr 2023 

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:

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