Installation Troubleshooting 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.

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.

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.