Confluence 8.6 Upgrade Notes
Here are some important notes on upgrading to Confluence 8.6. For details of the new features and improvements in this release, see the Confluence 8.6 Release Notes.
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Upgrade notes
End of support for Server licenses
Confluence 8.6.0 is a Data Center-only release and doesn't support Server licenses. With Atlassian Server end of support, you’ll need to ensure you have a valid Data Center license before upgrading to Confluence 8.6.
To update your license within the product:
Go to Administration
> General Configuration > License DetailsUnder 'Update license', enter your Data Center license key
Select Save
Confluence 8.5.x Long Term Support release will continue to support Server licenses until February 15, 2024. Check out your options for upgrading
Faster permissions service enabled by default
Confluence 8.6 will have the faster permissions service enabled by default. The service delivers faster load times when Confluence must check permissions on a large number of pages – when loading a Task Report macro, Page Index macro, or the dashboard display when a person first logs in. This will benefit enterprises with large data sets and users.
The faster permissions service was originally shipped in Confluence 7.16 and disabled by default.
Configure the faster permissions service
New emoji audit logs
In Confluence 8.4, we enabled users to upload their own emojis (also known as custom emojis). We’ve since added audit logs for the following events so system admins easily search and track emoji-related activities on their instance:
Custom emoji upload enabled
Custom emoji upload disabled for users
Custom emoji uploaded
Custom emoji deleted by user
Custom emoji deleted by admin
See Audit Log Events in Confluence for more details about these and other audit logs.
Changes to Jira Issues Macro total count display
You can expect quicker load times when editing pages containing many Jira Issue macros set to display Total issues count. We've tweaked Jira Issues macro to cache the count when it's initially added to the editor, and again when it’s published, resulting in fewer calls made between Jira and Confluence.
To clear the cache and see the latest count within the editor, simply publish the page, then return to the editor. Refreshing the page in view mode will also clear the cached count.
This fix will be backported to Confluence 7.19.15 Long Term Support release. Learn more about this bug
Supported platform changes
Added support for PostgreSQL 15.
End of support announcements
There are no advance announcements for end of support.
Infrastructure changes
Head to Preparing for Confluence 8.6 to find out more about changes under the hood.
Known issues
- 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 > 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 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.