Here are some important notes on upgrading to Confluence 8.8. For details of the new features and improvements in this release, see the Confluence 8.8 release notes.

Upgrade notes

Questions for Confluence upgrade required

Customers who use the Questions for Confluence app should note that Confluence 8.8 has a breaking change that will require you to upgrade from Questions for Confluence 4.5.3 or earlier as soon as you upgrade to Confluence 8.8. Once Confluence is upgraded to 8.8, Questions for Confluence won’t load until it is upgraded to a more recent version.

Startup error: database attachment storage

If you're still storing attachments in the database (we deprecated this method in Confluence 5.4), you must migrate these to the file system before upgrading to Confluence 8.8 or later, otherwise Confluence will not start up successfully.

Learn how to migrate your attachments from database storage to file system storage

Changes to app uploads via the Universal Plugin Manager

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.

Removal of rarely used rendering methods in Confluence

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.

End of support for Server licenses

Confluence 8.7.x is a Data Center-only release and won't support Server licenses. With Atlassian Server end of support, make sure you have a valid Data Center license before upgrading to Confluence 8.6.x or later versions.

To update your license:

1. Go to Administration  > General Configuration > License Details

2. Under Update license, enter your Data Center license key

3. 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 platforms changes

Advance Notice: End of support for Java 11

Note that Confluence 8.9 will be the last release to support Java 11.

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

See full list of supported platforms

End of support announcements

Advance Notice: End of support for PostgreSQL 12

• Confluence 8.8 is the release to support PostgreSQL 12.
• PostgreSQL 12 will not be supported in Confluence 8.9 and later versions.

Advance Notice: End of support for Java 11

• Confluence 8.9 will be the last release to support Java 11.
• Java 11 will not be supported in Confluence 9.0 and later versions.

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

Infrastructure changes 

Head to Preparing for Confluence 8.8 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
• There is a known issue where Confluence 8.8.0 and 8.8.1, upon upgrade from earlier versions, will fail to render the login page for instances using custom layout decorators. The decorators could be using the resource, ./langmacro.vm, which is no longer included in Confluence 8.8 (and later). See After Upgrade , error encountered - ResourceNotFoundException: Unable to find resource '/langmacro.vm' for more information.

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.