This document tells you how to upgrade from one version of Confluence to a later version. These instructions apply to the standalone distribution of Confluence. The standalone distribution includes Apache Tomcat as the bundled application server.

If you want to upgrade an EAR/WAR distribution deployed on your own existing application server, please refer to Upgrading Confluence EAR-WAR Distribution instead.

Please also check the following before you start using this guide:

• The version of Confluence that you will be upgrading to. Refer to the documentation home page to verify the latest Confluence version and to find documentation for older versions.
• The supported platforms for the version that you will be upgrading to. Please see the Supported Platforms page for the version of Confluence that you will be upgrading to, as well as the End of Support Announcements for Confluence.
• If you are running Confluence on a cluster, please see Upgrading a Confluence Cluster instead of this document.

On this page:

Performing the Upgrade

To install Confluence, unzip the new Confluence installation zip file into a directory of your choice and then edit the configuration files to point your new installation to your existing data files. Follow these instructions:

1. Shut down your existing Confluence instance.
2. Download the Confluence Standalone zip file.
3. If you are on Windows, please check your unzip program before extracting the downloaded zip file. Some archive-extract programs cause errors when unzipping the Confluence zip file. You should use a third-party unzip program like 7Zip or Winzip. If you do not have one, please download and install one before continuing:
   • 7Zip — Recommended. If in doubt, download the '32-bit.exe' version
   • Winzip
4. Use your unzip program to unzip the installation file. You should now have a new directory called confluence-<version>, e.g. confluence-2.9.2-std.
   • In the rest of this document, we will refer to this as the <Installation-Directory>.
   • If you decide to change the location from the default, make sure that you choose a different location from your existing Confluence installation, because legacy files may cause problems if you install the new Confluence version into an existing directory.
   • Do not use spaces in your directory path.
   • You can read more about the Confluence Installation directory.
5. Edit the confluence-init.properties file found at: <Installation-Directory>\confluence\WEB-INF\classes\confluence-init.properties
   and update 'confluence.home' to point to your existingConfluence Home directory.
   • You can read more about the Confluence Home directory.
   • Make sure you have first backed up this directory, as instructed above.
   • Open the confluence-init.properties file in a text editor such as Notepad.

   • Scroll to the bottom and find this line:

     # confluence.home=c:/confluence/data

   • Remove the '#' and the space at the beginning of this line, so that Confluence no longer regards the line as a comment. The line should now begin with confluence.home.
   • Update the directory name after the = sign, to point to your existing Confluence Home directory.

6. If you are running Confluence as a Windows service, use 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 the Start Confluence Automatically on Windows as a Service topic.

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

7. If you are using an external database (i.e. not the embedded HSQLDB/H2 database supplied for evaluation purposes), copy the jdbc driver jar file from your old Confluence Standalone installation to the new Confluence Standalone installation. The jdbc driver jar file in the old Confluence Standalone installation should be located in either the <Install-Directory>/common/lib or <Installation-Directory>/confluence/WEB-INF/lib directories. Once you have identified this file, copy it to either the <Install-Directory>/lib or <Installation-Directory>/confluence/WEB-INF/lib directories of your Confluence 3.x installation.
8. If you have delegated your user management to JIRA, LDAP, Crowd (or any other external user management system) and you are upgrading from a version of Confluence prior to 3.5, copy the following files from your old Confluence installation to your new Confluence installation:
   • <Installation-Directory>/confluence/WEB-INF/classes/osuser.xml.

   • <Installation-Directory>/confluence/WEB-INF/classes/atlassian-user.xml(if you are upgrading from Confluence 2.2 or later).

     Please review our KB article first: Upgrade to Confluence 3.5 with JIRA User Management Fails

     If you are upgrading from an earlier version of Confluence (2.5.5 and earlier) and are copying your existing atlassian-user.xml file from your previous instance, please ensure that the hibernate cache parameter in this file has been enabled, to avoid performance related issues. (NOTE: If you use Crowd for your user management, you do not need to do this.): <hibernate name="Hibernate Repository" key="hibernateRepository" description="Hibernate Repository" cache="true" />

9. If you have delegated your user management to Crowd, you will also need to copy the Crowd configuration file from your old Confluence installation to your new Confluence installation: <Installation-Directory>/confluence/WEB-INF/classes/crowd.properties. If you need more information, please refer to the Crowd documentation.
10. Consider any adjustments you need to make to customisations and special configurations, as described below.
    Your new version of Confluence may not function correctly or could encounter problems or errors if these are not implemented.
11. Start your new version of Confluence.
    Please note that Confluence will need to re-index attachments and this can take 5-10 minutes. Please wait until Confluence has finished indexing the attachments before trying to access Confluence via your web browser.
12. During the startup process Confluence will create any missing database indexes. If you created any database indexes on your own, please check those afterwards and remove those that duplicate the indexes added by Confluence. Just in case you run into any errors which prevent Confluence from starting up, you can set the system property hibernate.hbm2ddl.skip_creating_missing_indexes to true to skip automatic index creation.
13. Visit Confluence in your web browser and log in using a username from your previous Confluence installation. You should be able to log in immediately, without seeing the Setup Wizard.
14. Take a quick look around your Confluence site to confirm that all your spaces and pages are present and everything looks normal. You should see the new Confluence version number in the page footer.

Reapplying Customisations to your New Confluence

Checking for Known Issues and Troubleshooting the Confluence Upgrade

Useful Plugins

RELATED TOPICS

Upgrading Confluence
Upgrading Confluence EAR-WAR Distribution
Confluence Installation Guide
Important Directories and Files
Site Backup and Restore
Database Configuration