Upgrading Confluence.

The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center is under maintenance to get the latest version of Confluence.
I need to perform this upgrade on Monday December 28th.
We are currently running Confluence 3.5.9.
As I understand it, I need to upgrade to 5.0.3 and then to 5.9.
I have two questions:

How do I go about downloading Confluence 5.0.3 and 5.9?
Does the Bob Swift Wiki ML add on work with 5.9?

Thank you.

5 answers

3 votes

What Nic said is absolutely right, any version less that 3.5.17 should be upgraded to 3.5.17 and then to 5.0.3 and finally to 5.x.
Main point of consideration is there might be deprecated plugins that might be broken after Upgrade.
You should always do an Upgrade on Dev environment, Test it by giving access to power users (Space Owners) and collect feedback from them, apply fixes if any (consulting Atlassian (provided you have valid license), Atlassian Answers) later do it on Staging or directly on Production once you document all bugs and workarounds for them.
You should consider Updating JAVA before Upgrading to 3.5.17 referring to Release Notes of 3.5.17 https://confluence.atlassian.com/doc/confluence-3-5-17-release-notes-294488249.html
Later refer to Release Notes and Supported Platforms of 5.0.3
https://confluence.atlassian.com/doc/confluence-5-0-3-release-notes-330794273.html
If you are having SQL Server Database, there is a known bug Upgrading from 5.0.3 to version more than 5.7 where you have to switch datasource mentioned in https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONF-36430
So you have to generate System Info report from current Instance and later take suggestions on Performing Upgrade.
We can help you on how to proceed if you can attach System Info report here.

Regards

Chander Inguva

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3 votes

The simple answers are:

No, you need to upgrade to 3.5.17, then you can think about 5.x
Go to the downloads page. Click the download link on the versions you need to step through
My guess is that you mean Bob's rather excellent HTML addon, which will work with 5.9 and should be installed via the plugin manager

However. Doing this upgrade on the 28th is a joke, right? I'm sorry, that can be taken as insulting, but I do mean it light-heartedly. I suspect you've been asked to do this and it's not your field of expertise. This is not a simple upgrade unless you have a really small system with low complexity (and in the cases of a small-ish system, a better option might be to skip upgrading and just install a new system and import everything).

If you have more than a handful of spaces with few spaces, you probably won't be able to test this upgrade in 5 days, let alone be ready to implement it. I'm not sure 5 days is enough time to tell your users about all the changes they'll have to understand, let alone do it.

Could you give us an idea of how large your installation is? And what add-ons you have (and are using)?

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We have about 30 users. It's not very customized although I can't speak to the exact level. We tested an eval version of 5.8.

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Ok, so if you tested an eval version, you already know where to download it. Have you completed the testing of that and proved it all works? If your upgrade test went fine, then you should follow the same process to upgrade production - go to 3.5.17, then whatever other versions you went through.

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Ah, and yes, upgrade to 5.8. If you want to go to 5.9, you need to test that path properly before doing it.

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0 votes

I am ready to begin testing.
Can someone please point me in the direction of Confluence 3.5.17?
I see lots of links to the release notes but not any actual download links.

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https://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/download-archives/

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Thank you for the quick response.
Will I be able to generate a license key for the incremental versions?

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Same key should work for 3 through to 6 if memory serves.

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I am sorry to be so much trouble, but I can not determine how to install 3.5.17.
All I see to download is a ZIP file. Is there no installer?
According to the documentation here:
https://confluence.atlassian.com/doc/installing-confluence-on-windows-from-zip-file-144212170.html It seems that the something should start as I'm unzipping but nothing does.
I have Java installed and I am using 7-zip as recommended. The document makes it seem as if unzipping will begin the installation process and I will define the home directory. All I get is unpacked files.

If I follow the link for "older versions":
https://confluence.atlassian.com/alldoc/confluence-documentation-directory-12877996.html
There is a wealth of documentation for administering an installation of 3.5.17 but not a single document on how to install it.
How do I install 3.5.17?

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No, there's no installer, they're more recent packaging.

The unpacked files are fine - you need to edit the properties file to set the home directory, then just go into the "bin" directory to run the start.sh

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I was able to follow the instructions. I ran into some snags here and there but was able to work them out thanks to the troubleshooting document.
However, once I got startup.bat to run it froze on the Tomcat window displaying INFO: Server startup in 18483 ms.
Then nothing.
I don't see anything like that listed in the troubleshooting steps.
12498890_10153739760471480_445636551_n.jpg

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Is there no help available for this?

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Sorry, didn't see the earlier comment.

That means it is running. Or, at least, the Tomcat container is running. You should be able to visit the Confluence install in your browser now.

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When I try to reach http://localhost:8090/ I get "The Page Can't Be Displayed" error.

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Ok, what is at the bottom of atlassian-confluence.log?

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This is all the log contains.

2016-01-26 17:06:31,738 INFO [main] [com.atlassian.confluence.lifecycle] contextInitialized Starting Confluence 3.5.17 (build #2176)
2016-01-26 17:06:36,625 INFO [main] [atlassian.plugin.manager.DefaultPluginManager] init Initialising the plugin system
2016-01-26 17:06:36,975 INFO [main] [atlassian.plugin.manager.DefaultPluginManager] init Plugin system started in 0:00:00.348
2016-01-26 17:06:39,626 WARN [main] [atlassian.config.xml.AbstractDom4jXmlConfigurationPersister] saveDocumentAtomically Unable to move D:\Confluence\Data\confluence.cfg.xml2965695627560678942tmp to D:\Confluence\Data\confluence.cfg.xml. Falling back to non-atomic overwrite.
2016-01-26 17:06:41,911 INFO [main] [com.atlassian.confluence.lifecycle] init Confluence is ready to serve

I would have replied to this earlier but when I tried to reply yesterday I was given this message:
Your activity is currently limited because you've commented, answered or asked a question 2 times in the past 24 hours. These limits apply until you earn 3 points, then you can ask, answer and comment as much as you like.
How do I earn points so I don't have to wait to continue dialog?

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To earn points, keep commenting and interacting, and ideally, getting upvotes.

I don't like the look of that warning, it implies the system doesn't have complete read/write access to the data directories. But the "ready to serve" means there should be something there.

Could you have a quick look at the end of the catalina.out file too - that might have something in it.