Below are some important notes on upgrading to Confluence 3.5. For details of the new features and improvements in this release, please read the Confluence 3.5 release notes.
On this page:
This release includes the new 'autowatch' feature, as described in the release notes. With autowatch turned on, you will receive an email notification each time someone edits or comments on a page that you added or updated.
Note that autowatch is enabled by default for all new and existing users on upgrade. We recommend that you let all Confluence users know that autowatch will be turned on for their usernames when you upgrade to Confluence 3.5. People can turn autowatch off by editing the email settings in their user profile.
This release brings a fresh set of profile pictures. After you have upgraded to Confluence 3.5, the old set will no longer be available for selection. Users who have already chosen one of the old pictures will keep that picture. If they later choose a new picture or upload their own picture, they will not be able to go back to the old picture again.
In Confluence 3.5, we have changed the term 'team labels' to the more descriptive term 'space categories'. These are keywords that you can apply to spaces, in order to group logically-related spaces.
Confluence 3.5 also introduces a new space directory that displays a list of spaces and offers them grouped by space category.
If your Confluence site has a number of team labels (now called space categories) already applied to the spaces, you may want to tidy up the categories to optimise your space directory.
More information:
As mentioned in the release notes, the Atlassian Support Tools plugin is now shipped with Confluence. If you installed the earlier version of the plugin, you will need to uninstall it before upgrading Confluence.
The way Confluence stores, accesses and manages users and groups is completely different in Confluence 3.5. You will notice many improvements, as described in the release notes. When you upgrade to Confluence 3.5, the upgrade process will automatically migrate your data by doing the following:
The sections below describe the upgrade considerations for each supported configuration type.
If your Confluence installation currently manages its users and groups in the Confluence database then there are no actions required on upgrade. This applies to Confluence sites that are not connected to Crowd, JIRA, LDAP or a custom directory for user management.
If your Confluence currently uses the standard method of connecting to an LDAP server for authentication and user management then the upgrade process will migrate the configuration.
To ensure that the upgrade process can migrate your configuration, please follow the Confluence upgrade guide. In particular, make sure that you:
Copy the following files from your old Confluence installation to your new Confluence installation:
<Installation-Directory>/confluence/WEB-INF/classes/atlassian-user.xml <Installation-Directory>/confluence/WEB-INF/classes/osuser.xml |
Please follow these steps after the upgrade is complete:
If you are using a legacy LDAP configuration (such as OSUser with LDAP authentication only), you'll need to reconfigure your LDAP support as covered on Connecting to an LDAP Directory and Connecting to an Internal Directory with LDAP Authentication. In case you encounter an issue, please refer to Upgrade to Confluence 3.5 with OSUser LDAP authentication fails for more details.
If you are already using JIRA to manage your Confluence users, via the JDBC connection to the JIRA database, you must upgrade Confluence to version 3.5 before upgrading JIRA to version 4.3.
JIRA 4.3 has a significantly different database schema and exposes a new REST interface, which Confluence will depend on for continued JIRA user management. If you upgrade to JIRA 4.3 before upgrading to Confluence 3.5, your Confluence users will no longer be able to log in once you upgrade to Confluence 3.5.
Confluence 3.5 does not ship with an OSUser migrator, and it will not recognise the OSUser definition in your atlassian-user.xml file. When upgrading Confluence:
atlassian-user.xml and osuser.xml to your Confluence 3.5 installation directory.server.xml file is copied to your Confluence 3.5 installation directory, in order to retain the JIRA datasource.Please follow these steps after the upgrade is complete:
If you are using Confluence with Atlassian Crowd for user management and SSO:
Copy the following files from your old Confluence installation to your new Confluence installation:
<Installation-Directory>/confluence/WEB-INF/classes/atlassian-user.xml |
WEB-INF/lib/ directory.If you are using com.atlassian.crowd.integration.seraph.v22.ConfluenceAuthenticator for SSO (defined in $CONFLUENCE$/WEB-INF/classes/seraph-config.xml), please use the newer version instead: com.atlassian.confluence.user.ConfluenceCrowdSSOAuthenticator. Specifically, change this:
<authenticator class="com.atlassian.crowd.integration.seraph.v22.ConfluenceAuthenticator"/> |
to this
<authenticator class="com.atlassian.confluence.user.ConfluenceCrowdSSOAuthenticator"/> |
See Connecting to Crowd or JIRA for User Management.
Custom authenticators, as defined in seraph-config.xml, are not affected and should work in the same way as in earlier versions of Confluence.
Custom directory types are not possible and not supported in Confluence 3.5 and later. If you have custom providers defined in OSUser or in Atlassian-User, thus defining your own storage for users and groups, the upgrade procedure will prevent you from starting Confluence.
Please see if one of the following solutions will work for you:
If you need to keep the custom directory connection, please consider whether Atlassian Crowd meets your requirements. See the documentation on developing a custom directory connector for Crowd.
Confluence 3.5 includes the Unified Applications Link (UAL) plugin which manages trust relationships. Authentication for trust relationships, such as Trusted Apps and OAuth, is now configured via Application Links in your administration console. When you first navigate to the Application Links screen, you will be prompted to upgrade your existing Trusted Apps and OAuth trust relationships to application links.
For instructions on how to upgrade your links, see Upgrading an Application Link.
Please note, there is a known issue with the upgrade dialog. This will affect you if you have set up two different types of authentication (e.g. Trusted Apps and OAuth) to the same remote server. The upgrade message displayed on your Application Links screen will prompt you to upgrade two application links. However, you actually only need to have one application link with two authentication types configured, i.e. upgrade one application link and then configure the missing authentication type on that upgraded link.
We have upgraded the Confluence search engine from Lucene 2.2.0 to 2.9.3. As a result, a reindex is highly recommended when you upgrade. The search will continue to work after upgrade even without a reindex, but you will see exceptions in the logs and reduced capabilities.
When you upgrade to Confluence 3.5, an upgrade task will run automatically to rebuild the index. During the rebuild task, the upgrade process will require three times the size of the index on disk in order to perform the upgrade task. This space will be freed up when the upgrade process has finished.
If you would prefer to rebuild your index later, you can pass the following argument to Confluence when starting up after the upgrade:
-Dconfluence.skip.reindex=true |
The initial startup will show an error message from ConfluenceSearcherInitialisation in the logs, because the warming query is run before the upgrade task. This is not a problem.
We have removed the following system property: confluence.import.use-legacy-importer. Specifying this property will no longer have any effect in Confluence. See Recognised System Properties. (See the Confluence 3.3 documentation for the behaviour in earlier versions of Confluence.)
If your Confluence installation is connected to a MySQL database, please ensure that this database uses the 'READ-COMMITTED' transaction isolation level. MySQL's default transaction isolation mode:
See the last step of the MySQL server installation procedure for details.
This section provides advanced warnings of features in Confluence 3.5 that will be deprecated in Confluence 4.0 (a future release of Confluence).
Confluence 4.0 will no longer support the ability to convert a global space to a personal space. Our research has shown that this feature is used very little. Hence, we have decided to remove this feature as part of our ongoing mission to simplify Confluence where possible.
In Confluence 4.0, the 'Mail Page' plugin will no longer be bundled with Confluence. This means that the 'Mail Page' feature for e-mailing a page will not be available in Confluence (out of the box) and the Share button will be the recommended method for e-mailing pages to others.
As previously announced, from this release onwards we no longer offer support for:
Please see End of Support Announcements for Confluence.
We are planning to end support for the following database and browsers in Confluence 4.0:
Please see End of Support Announcements for Confluence.
We now offer support for:
This section is of interest to plugin developers. As stated above, we have upgraded the Confluence search engine from Lucene 2.2.0 to 2.9.3. A number of Lucene methods are now deprecated. These methods will be listed when you compile your plugin. We recommend that you consult the Lucene documentation and replace these methods as soon as possible. They will no longer be available when Confluence upgrades to Lucene 3. This further upgrade is not yet scheduled, but we plan to do it sometime.
jQuery is the supported JavaScript library for plugin developers.
We first announced the deprecation of other JavaScript libraries with Confluence 2.8. Please note that we have now removed the following libraries from Confluence:
X11 dependencies/libraries on Unix-/Linux-based operating systems are no longer required by Confluence 3.5 or later. Hence, these libraries do not need to be installed for your Confluence 3.5 upgrade or when installing a new instance of Confluence 3.5 or later.
As always, please test your upgrades in your test environment before rolling into production. |
If you are already running a version of Confluence, please follow these instructions to upgrade to the latest version: