Upgrading Confluence Manually

Before you begin

Before you upgrade Confluence, there's a few questions you need to answer. 

Plan your upgrade

1. Determine your upgrade path

2. Complete the pre-upgrade checks

3. Upgrade Confluence in a test environment

Upgrade Confluence

4. Back up 

1. Back up your database and confirm the backup was created properly. 
   If your database does not support online backups you'll need to stop Confluence first. 
    
   Once you've confirmed your database backup was successful, you can choose to disable the automatic generation of an upgrade recovery file, as this process can take a long time for sites that are medium sized or larger.
     

2. Back up your installation directory and home directory. 
     

   Where is my home directory?

   You can find the location of your home directory in the <installation-directory>/confluence/WEB-INF/classes/confluence-init.properties file.

   This is where your search indexes and attachments are stored. If you store attachments outside the Confluence Home directory, you should also backup your attachments directory. 

5. Download Confluence

Download the appropriate file for your operating system - https://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/download

6. Extract the file and upgrade Confluence

1. Stop Confluence.
   See Using read-only mode for site maintenance if you need to provide uninterrupted access.
     
2. Extract (unzip) the files to a directory (this is your new installation directory, and must be different to your existing installation directory)
   Note: There are some known issues with unzipping the archive on Windows. We recommend using 7Zip or Winzip.
     

3. Edit  <Installation-Directory>\confluence\WEB-INF\classes\confluence-init.properties file to point to your existing Confluence home directory.
     

4. If you're using an Oracle or MySQL database, you'll need to copy your jdbc driver jar file from your existing Confluence installation directory to confluence/WEB-INF/lib in your new installation directory. 
     

5. There are some additional steps you make need to take if:
   

   • you are running Confluence as a Windows Service

     Click here to expand...

     If you are running Confluence as a Windows service, go to the command prompt and type:  

     <Installation-Directory>\bin\service.bat remove Confluence

     It is vital that you stop and remove the existing service prior to uninstalling the old instance of Confluence. For more information on running Confluence as Windows service, please refer to Start Confluence Automatically on Windows as a Service.

      To remove the service installed by the Confluence installer, you'll need to run <confluence auto installer installation folder>\UninstallService.bat.

   • You are running Confluence on a different port (not the default 8090) 

     Click here to expand...

     If you are not running Confluence on port 8090 update  <Installation-Directory>\conf\server.xml file to include your ports.

6. Start your new Confluence. You should not see the setup wizard.  

After the upgrade

7. Reinstall the service (Windows only)

If you run Confluence as a service on Windows you should delete the existing service then re-install the service by running <install-directory>/bin/service.bat.

This makes sure the service gets the most recent JVM options. 

8. Re-apply any modifications

If you have customized Confluence (such as an SSL configuration in the server.xml file, or CATALINA_OPTS or JAVA_OPTS parameters in your confluence-init.properties file), you'll need to perform the following steps after the upgrade is complete:

1. Stop your upgraded Confluence instance.
2. Reapply the customizations to the relevant files in the newly upgraded Confluence Installation directory.
3. Restart the upgraded Confluence instance.

We strongly recommend you test your customizations in a test instance prior to upgrading your production instance as changes may have been made to Confluence that make your customizations unsuable.

9. Update your reverse proxy and check you can access Confluence

Troubleshooting