Here are some important notes on upgrading to Confluence 8.5. For details of the new features and improvements in this release, see the Confluence 8.5 Release Notes. 

Upgrade notes

Ready to upgrade? Check out the Confluence 8.5 Long Term Support Release Change Log for an overview of the changes to be aware from Confluence 7.19 to Confluence 8.5 before making the move.

MS SQL Server JDBC Driver Upgrade in Confluence 8.5.15

The JDBC driver for MS SQL Server has been upgraded from version 7.4 to 12.6. If you are using SQL Server via JDBC and your database isn't configured for SSL connections, you must explicitly disable encryption in Confluence's connection URL string. With the updated driver, encryption is enabled by default. To disable it, append ;encrypt=false to the existing connection string. We recommend making this update before upgrading to avoid any downtime.

Check out how to locate the connection string

Changes to app uploads via the Universal Plugin Manager in Confluence 8.5.7

To enhance security, we’ve changed how Data Center products, including Confluence, handle app installation through the Universal Plugin Manager (UPM) and REST APIs. The Upload App button of UPM is now disabled by default. System admins can still enable app installation via two possible workarounds:

1. Re-enable the UI upload button and API. Setting the system property upm.plugin.upload.enabled to true. For security reasons, do not leave this setting on permanently. We recommend turning it off once plugin upload is complete.

2. Load custom plugins from your Confluence file system. Set the system atlassian.confluence.plugin.scan.directory to a target location of your custom plugins, which will be loaded into the system upon restart. We recommend a directory within the Confluence home directory, such as $CONFLUENCE_HOME/plugins/installed-plugins. Make sure you restart Confluence after setting this property.
   **If you run a Confluence cluster, a rolling restart is enough to pick up the configuration properties you set to enable the features. 

This change doesn’t affect the installation of apps from the Atlassian Marketplace. Note that the UPM upload option is still enabled for instances running in dev mode. 

For further details, visit Managing system and Marketplace apps. 

Enhance the security of your directory - Confluence 8.5.5

In this release, we've added documentation to help you increase the security of your tar.gz or zip file Confluence installations by providing an extra layer of permissions for your installation files and folders.

See the 'Enhance Directory Security' step in our installation guides for Windows and Linux to learn how to do this.

Removal of Velocity servlet support in Confluence 8.5.5

Overview - Support for rendering URLs ending in .vm has been removed from this version. As a result, this functionality will stop working, and changes will be required.

Note that this doesn’t impact a plugin’s ability to utilize VM files inside actions.

Action Required - With the removal of Velocity servlet support in Confluence, affected plugins are now required to leverage Struts actions for serving Velocity template-based UI screens, which offer additional server rendering control and security features.

Removal of rarely used rendering methods in Confluence 8.5.5

This release required the unplanned removal of a number of rarely used rendering methods. In some very rare circumstances this may result in customer-developed plugins or user macros failing to render. If you encounter broken user macros after this upgrade, please contact Atlassian Support.

Upgrade your apps in 8.5.4 and later

When upgrading to Confluence 8.5.4 and later versions, ensure you've upgraded all of your apps to their latest versions. We've introduced some security changes in Confluence 8.5.4 that can cause compatibility issues with older app versions.

Learn how to upgrade your apps

Supported platform changes

There are no platform changes in this version. See complete list of supported platforms

End of support announcements

There are no advance announcements for end of support.

For more information on these notices, see End of Support Announcements for Confluence.

Infrastructure changes 

Head to Preparing for Confluence 8.5 to find out more about changes under the hood. 

Known issues

• There is a known issue where Confluence 7.19.14 and Confluence 8.5.1 fail to start up or run correctly when running in old Linux distributions that don’t have GLIBC_2.14 installed. To resolve this issue, upgrade to a supported Linux OS that has GLIBC_2.14 or newer bundled. See CONFSERVER-91652 to learn more about this issue

• There is a known issue where the Task Report macro returns a timeout or error state when faster permissions is enabled. As a temporary fix, we will not use faster permissions on this macro in Confluence 7.19.2 and later. Track this issue at CONFSERVER-79865
• 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 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.

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 menu , then 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 menu , then 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 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.