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Atlassian support or the Atlassian bug-fixing team may occasionally provide patches for critical issues that have been resolved but have not yet made it into a release. Those patches will be class files which are attached to the relevant issue in our JIRA bug-tracking system.

Installation Instructions for the Confluence Distribution

Follow these steps to install a patched class file:

Shut down your confluence instance.
Copy the supplied class files to <installation-directory>/confluence/WEB-INF/classes/<subdirectories>, where:
- <installation-directory> must be replaced with your Confluence Installation directory. (If you need more information, read about the Confluence Installation Directory.)
- <subdirectories> must be replaced by the value specified in the relevant JIRA issue. This value will be different for different issues. In some cases, the subdirectories will not exist and you will need to create them before copying the class files. Some issues will contain the patch in the form of a ZIP file which will contain the desired directory structure.
Restart your Confluence instance for the changes to become effective.

Class files in the /WEB-INF/classes directory of a web application will be loaded before classes located in JAR files in the /WEB-INF/lib directory. Therefore, classes in the first directory will effectively replace classes of the same name and package which would otherwise be loaded from the JAR files.

Reverting the patch

To revert the patch, simply remove the class files from the <installation-directory>/confluence/WEB-INF/classes/ folder (taking care to only remove those that apply to the patch you wish to revert), then restart the instance.

Once the issue that the patch relates to is resolved, you should upgrade to the version of Confluence that contains the fix, and revert the patch. Patches are often naive and untested and may not solve the problem in the most efficient way. As such, an official fix should be preferred in all cases.