Confluence 8.7 upgrade notes
Here are some important notes on upgrading to Confluence 8.7. For details of the new features and improvements in this release, see the Confluence 8.7 release notes.
Note: Confluence 8.7.1 is the first General Availability release for Confluence 8.7. Confluence 8.7.0 was an internal release and is not available for download.
Upgrade notes
Enhance the security of your directory - 8.7.2
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 8.7.2
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 8.7.2
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 8.7.1 and later
When upgrading to Confluence 8.7.1 and later versions, ensure you've upgraded all of your apps to their latest versions. We've introduced some security changes in Confluence 8.7.1 that can cause compatibility issues with older app versions.
Learn how to upgrade your apps
End of support for Server licenses
This 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 menu
, then 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
Supported platform changes
Added support for:
- Microsoft SQL Server 2022
- Pgpool-II (clustered database for PostgreSQL). Learn how to configure this
See a full list of supported platforms
End of support announcements
There are no advance announcements for end of support.
Infrastructure changes
Head to Preparing for Confluence 8.7 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 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.