Confluence Main FAQ

An error is preventing Confluence from starting.

1. Open a command prompt. On Windows, do this by clicking on your Start menu, then click Run. In the Run box, type cmd and press OK
2. From the command prompt, go to your Confluence install directory
3. Go into the bin subdirectory
4. Run startup.bat and read the error message
5. Find the solution to that error below

If you are seeing "java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: com/atlassian/confluence/pages/persistence/dao/hibernate/AbstractHibernateAttachmentDao$IntraHibernateAttachmentCopier", you have unzipped Confluence using a program that cannot handle long filenames. You must delete your install directory and go back to the point in the instructions that covers unzipping Confluence using a third-party unzip program.

If http://localhost:8080 goes to an error page when you run Confluence, go to the install directory and find the /logs/catalina.out. If this file contains a single line error starting with "Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError", your install path may contain spaces. The solution is to rename your install directory path so that there are no spaces, then restart Confluence.

The confluence.home variable specified in confluence-init.properties cannot be created. To fix this, edit /confluence/WEB-INF/classes/confluence-init.properties and check the path specified exists. Make sure all the directory slashes use / and that the # has been removed. If you're stuck, try using confluence.home=c:/confluence/data

You have not installed the Java Development Kit, or not set the %JAVA_HOME% to the directory of the JDK. You should re-check your steps in Stage 2.

If you have another Tomcat running on the same machine, you must edit <INSTALL>/conf/server.xml and change both 8080 and 8005 to ports that do not conflict with your other Tomcat instance according to these instructions.

You will need to adjust your system time.

If you did not use one of the recommended unzipping tools, and happened to use for instance the default Windows XP extractor, one of the classes required for starting up Confluence may not be located due to the lengthy file-path. This is due to the reason that the default Windows tool silently fails to extract files with long names. We suggest you to use other tools such as WinZIP and 7zip and redo the deployment process.

Cause:
org.springframework.beans.factory.BeanDefinitionStoreException: Error registering bean with name 'fileSystemAttachmentDataDao' defined in class path resource applicationContext.xml: Class that bean class com.atlassian.confluence.pages.persistence.dao.FileSystemAttachmentDataDao depends on not found; nested exception is java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: com/atlassian/confluence/pages/persistence/dao/FileSystemAttachmentDataDao$FileSystemAttachmentNamingStrategy
at org.springframework.beans.factory.xml.DefaultXmlBeanDefinitionParser.parseBeanDefinition(DefaultXmlBeanDefinitionParser.java:366)
caused by: java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: com/atlassian/confluence/pages/persistence/dao/FileSystemAttachmentDataDao$FileSystemAttachmentNamingStrategy
at java.lang.Class.forName0(Native Method)

Check the server logs for errors. If you are running Confluence Standalone on Windows, error messages will be printed to the console window that opened when you ran startup.bat. On Unix systems, Confluence will log messages to logs/catalina.out.

The CATALINA_HOME environment variable is set to another instance of Tomcat. You should run shutdown.sh, remove the CATALINA_HOME reference to the other Tomcat version, and run startup.sh again.

If you try to login with the correct username and password but are always returned to the login screen without any error messages, and you are running Zone Alarm, please check that it is not blocking the Confluence server