Confluence 6.9 Upgrade Notes
Here are some important notes on upgrading to Confluence 6.9. For details of the new features and improvements in this release, see the Confluence 6.9 Release Notes.
Upgrade notes
Confluence 6 is a major upgrade
If you're upgrading from Confluence 5.x, be sure to read these upgrade notes thoroughly, take a full backup, and test your upgrade in a non-production environment before upgrading your production site.
IPv6 support
We now support running Confluence in an IPv6 environment. In most cases there's nothing you need to do, however there are a few known issues and limitations that you need to be aware of:
- Must allow IPv4 traffic
Some parts of Confluence, including the Universal Plugin Manager and Atlassian Troubleshooting and Support tools, need to be able to connect to IPv4 sites, such as Atlassian Marketplace. - AWS RDS does not yet support IPv6
For this reason, our CloudFormation template and Quick Start, will continue to provision an IPv4 VPC. - The editor doesn't recognize IPv6 addresses
When you paste or type a raw IPv6 address into the editor, it won't automatically be treated as a link. Pasting the domain name of an IPv6 site will work just fine. - Some database drivers don't reconize IPv6 addresses
When connecting Confluence to your database server, you may need to use the fully qualified domain name, rather than the raw IPv6 address. - Avoid using a raw IPv6 address for your base URL
You should use a fully qualified domain name, rather than the raw IPv6 address for the base URL, to avoid problems with collaborative editing.
If you're running Confluence Data Center, and have collaborative editing enabled, you'll need to:
- Tell Synchrony not to prefer IPv4 by default. You can do this by uncommenting the relevant line in the Synchrony startup script or, if you don't use our script, start Synchrony with
-Dhazelcast.prefer.ipv4.stack=false. - Specify a fully qualified domain name for the Synchrony URL, not a raw IPv6 address.
Update configuration files after upgrading
The contents of configuration files such as server.xml, web.xml , setenv.bat / setenv.sh and confluenceinit.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.
Upgrading from Confluence 5.x?
Collaborative editing is made possible by the magic of Synchrony. When you install Confluence Server, Synchrony will be configured to run as a separate process on your server.
If you're upgrading from Confluence 5.x, there are a few requirements you need to be aware of:
Infrastructure changes
For developers
Head to Preparing for Confluence 6.9 to find out more about changes under the hood.
End of support announcements
No changes.
Known issues
- 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 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 the "hibernate dialect" property was being incorrectly retained after upgrade. Customers who have been using Confluence since version 2.4 or earlier (legends!) should check the hibernate dialect in their
<confluence-home>/confluence.cfg.xmlfile before upgrading to Confluence 6.x to avoid this error: Upgrading fails with ERROR The size (16777215) given to the column 'event' exceeds the maximum allowed for any data type (8000) in Confluence. - There is a known issue when upgrading Confluence with an Oracle database. Oracle users should upgrade their driver to 12.2.0.x before upgrading to Confluence 6.1 or later. See Upgrade to version 6.1.x Failed With Error "ORA-01000: maximum open cursors exceeded" for more information.
Upgrade procedure
Note: Upgrade to a test environment first. Test your upgrades in your test environment before rolling them into production.
If you're already running a version of Confluence, please follow these instructions to upgrade to the latest version:
- Go to > Support Tools > Health Check to check your license validity, application server, database setup and more.
- Before you upgrade, we strongly recommend that you back up your installation directory, home directory and database.
- If your version of Confluence is earlier than 6.5, read the release notes and upgrade guides for all releases between your version and the latest version.
- Download the latest version of Confluence.
- Follow the instructions in the Upgrade Guide.
Checking for known issues and troubleshooting the Confluence upgrade
After you have completed the steps required to upgrade your Confluence installation, check all the items on the Confluence post-upgrade checklist to ensure that everything works as expected. If something is not working correctly, please check for known Confluence issues and try troubleshooting your upgrade as described below:
- Check for known issues. Sometimes we find out about a problem with the latest version of Confluence after we have released the software. In such cases we publish information about the known issues in the Confluence Knowledge Base.
- Check for answers from the community. Other users may have encountered the same issue. You can check for answers from the community at Atlassian Community.
- Did you encounter a problem during the Confluence upgrade? Please refer to the guide to troubleshooting upgrades in the Confluence Knowledge Base.
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.