Frequently Asked Questions

Old documentation This is the old list of frequently asked questions, left here temporarily. Please refer to the latest FAQ for up-to-date information.

The best way you can help make this FAQ more useful is by asking questions: either in any of the places above, or by leaving your questions in the comments below.

• Bugs and requests for new features can be submitted to JIRA.
• Ideas for new features can be talked about in the discussion space
• If you have a support query, please submit this on our new support system at http://support.atlassian.com

  General How does Confluence differ from a wiki? Can I use CamelCaseLinks like they do on WardsWiki? How do I display an attached image in a page? How do I set Confluence to redirect users to a space homepage immediately after login? How do I migrate Confluence from one database to another? How do I change the port used by Confluence Standalone? Where does Confluence store all its data? I can not find the "Rich Text" editor. Is the editor part of Confluence 1.4.3? Users and Permissions How do I configure Confluence for public/anonymous access? Can I restrict access to individual pages within a space? How do I prevent just anyone from being able to sign up for new accounts? How do I share users and groups between Confluence and JIRA? I have lost my administrator password, what do I do? Does the license check include deactivated users?

  Troubleshooting I am using MySQL, and after a while Confluence stops working with database errors. When Confluence tries to send mail, I get a "javax.mail.NoSuchProviderException: smtp" error. I am using MS SQL Server and I get a "ResultSet can not re-read row data for column 2" error. I am trying to use thumbnails, and I get the message: "This Confluence installation can not generate thumbnails: no image support in Java runtime" I am using Fedora Linux, and PDF exports fail with an UnsatisfiedLinkError I am getting Out of Memory errors, how can I allocate more memory to tomcat? Search is not finding my data AND the indexing process does not appear to be completing I am trying to install Confluence but the demo-site.zip is missing? I am trying to compile a plugin, but get an error about the "target release" I am getting "404" errors in the Space tree view I am getting an error message about NoClassDefFoundError when using the Chart macro Confluence says "the license you entered was not valid" when I try and register I am getting JavaScript errors when using Confluence The {rss}, {jiraissues} or {html-include} macros fail when retrieving data from SSL (https) servers Troubleshooting failed XML site backups

General

How does Confluence differ from a wiki?

Essentially, Confluence is a wiki. Our aim was to build an application that was built to the requirements of an enterprise knowledge management system, without losing the essential, powerful simplicity of the wiki in the process.

From the wiki, we took the following lessons:

• It should be easy for anyone to create and edit pages
• It should be easy for anyone to link pages together
• It should be easy to see what has changed recently
• The site should be searchable
• Users should have the tools to organise and group pages without having any particular structure imposed upon them

On top of that, we added professional features, such as the partitioning of content into separately managed spaces, user- and group-based access control, automated refactoring, PDF exporting, searchable attachments, a comprehensive remote API, easy installation and a professional and easy-to-use presentation; all wrapped up in Atlassian's "Legendary Service".

Can I use CamelCaseLinks like they do on WardsWiki?

Yes. However, CamelCaseLinks are turned off by default. The site administrator can enable them from the Administration Console.

How do I display an attached image in a page?

Simple. Attach the image to the page. You can then include the image in the page by putting just the attachment filename in your image tag, like so: !attachmentFilename.jpg! For example, the following code produces the subsequent image:

\!fish.gif\!

Go to the User Guide for more information on Working with images.

RELATED TOPICS:
Working with images
Confluence User Guide

Can I set Confluence to redirect users to a space homepage immediately after login?

Yes. This is configured by a site administrator from the Administration Console. Please vist the doc page on how to do this.

RELATED TOPICS:
Confluence Administration Guides
Customising Space Homepage

How do I migrate Confluence from one database to another?

First perform an XML backup of your Confluence site. You can do this from the Administration > Backup and Restore page.

Once you've made the backup file, you can set up a new Confluence instance from scratch against your new database and restore the backup that you just created. Detailed instructions can be found here.

RELATED TOPICS:
Configuration Guide
Confluence Administration Guides

Where does Confluence store all its data?

Attachments, extensions and configuration files are stored in the Confluence Home Directorythat was configured when Confluence was first installed. All remaining data resides in the configured database. For more detailed answer to this question, see Confluence System Files and Data Storage.

I can not find the "Rich Text" editor. Does Confluence 1.4.3. contain the Editor?

The Rich Text Editor (aka WYSIWYG editor) is available in Confluence 2.O and upwards. A site administrator will need to enable Rich text editing from the Administration Console before you can use this option.

If you wish to upgrade your Confluence installation, instructions can be found here.

RELATED TOPICS:
Rich Text Editor Overview
Enabling Rich Text Editing

Users and Permissions

How do I configure Confluence for public/anonymous access?

There are two different permissions that need to be set to allow anonymous access to a Confluence site. First, the 'Anonymous' user needs the global "Use Confluence" permission, secondly you need to give 'Anonymous' permissions in each space you want to make public. Full instructions can be found here.

RELATED TOPICS
Security Overview
Users and Groups

Can I restrict access to individual pages within a space?

Yes, Confluence has a fine grained security structure that allows you to restrict access at the site, space and page levels. More information can be found in the Confluence User Guide.

RELATED TOPICS:
[Page Level Permissioning]
Space Permissions Overview

How do I prevent just anyone from being able to sign up for new accounts?

Public signup can be enabled or disabled from the 'General Configuration' section of the Administration Console.

How do I share users and groups between Confluence and [*JIRA|http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira]**?*
This topic has been covered in length here

I have lost my administrator password, what do I do?

You will have to change the pasword manually in the database. A detailed description of the process can be found under Restoring Passwords To Recover Admin User Rights.

Does the license check include deactivated users?

No. The license check only includes users who have 'use Confluence' permission.

As of Confluence 2.1.x, you can no longer deactivate users, but users who cannot use Confluence are still not counted in the license check.

RELATED TOPICS:
Removing a User
Viewing and Editing License Details

Troubleshooting

I am using MySQL, and after a while Confluence stops working with database errors.

MySQL's JDBC drivers have an annoying default behaviour where if a connection is idle for a certain amount of time (by default, eight hours), it is closed. Since Confluence uses a connection pool, this means that pooled connections die if they are not used within a certain time period.

The solution is to append ?autoReconnect=true to the end of your database's JDBC URL.

• If you are using JNDI data-sources, you will do this in your application server's configuration files.
• If you have configured Confluence to access the database directly, you will need to manually edit the hibernate.connection.url property in the confluence.cfg.xml file in your confluence.home directory. After you have changed the URL in this file, restart Confluence.

Note

In Confluence versions 1.0RC5 and before, there was a bug that manifested when you used Confluence to connect directly to a MySQL database instead of going through a datasource configured in the application-server under which Confluence runs. Unfortunately the symptoms of the bug were identical to the much more common problem above, so it took us a little longer to find the problem than we should have.

So long as you specify autoReconnect=true, Confluence 1.0RC6 and later should remain connected to your MySQL database indefinitely.

When Confluence tries to send mail, I get a "javax.mail.NoSuchProviderException: smtp" error.

The technical explanation is that you have two different versions of Sun's Javamail libraries in your application classpath. When Confluence tries to send an email, Java gets confused as to which version of the library it should be using, and falls over. If (and only if) you are encountering this error, try removing the Javamail-1.3.jar and activation-1.0.1.jar files from the confluence/WEB-INF/lib directory of your Confluence installation, and restarting the server. The problem should go away.

You can find more information on this forum thread

I am using MS SQL Server and I get a "ResultSet can not re-read row data for column 2" error.

See the Known Issues For SQL Server

I am trying to use thumbnails, and I get the message: "This Confluence installation can not generate thumbnails: no image support in Java runtime"

On some Java installations (i.e. Unix without X11), you need to pass an additional parameter to Java when you are starting up to tell it how to use its image-manipulation libraries.

To get thumbnail support working in this configuration, you need to start java with the argument '-Djava.awt.headless=true'. If you are using tomcat (or the Confluence standalone edition), try setting the environment variable JAVA_OPTS before starting the server. Assuming you're using the bourne or bash shell:

export JAVA_OPTS=-Djava.awt.headless=true

On Fedora Linux, you will also need to install the xorg-x11-deprecated-libs package. (See: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=130239)

For other application servers, techniques may vary. If you need help with a particular server, mail us at confluence-support@atlassian.com

I am using Fedora Linux, and PDF exports fail with an UnsatisfiedLinkError

You need to install the xorg-x11-deprecated-libs package. (See: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=130239)

I am getting Out of Memory errors, how can I allocate more memory to tomcat?

Since the default memory setting usually is around 64 or 128MB, you might have to adjust the settings to run a bigger Confluence instance with sufficent memory. In order to allocate more memory to tomcat, you will have to change the following settings:

On Linux
Edit the file $TOMCAT_HOME/bin/startup.sh and insert the following line, subsituting for the desired value, eg. Bash Shell:
export CATALINA_OPTS=-Xms(min heap)m -Xmx(max heap)m;

On Windows
Edit the file $TOMCAT_HOME\bin\startup.bat and insert or alter the following line, subsituting for the desired values:
set CATALINA_OPTS=-Xms(min heap)m -Xmx(max heap)m

For example if you want to allocate a minimum heap size of 256MB and a max heap size of 512MB you will have to write the following on Windows:
set CATALINA_OPTS=-Xms256m -Xmx512m

If you are running tomcat 5.5 via tomcat.exe, you can update the heap size by running tomcatw.exe and setting the required values via the Java tab.

On OS X
If you are using the 'serveradmin start appserver' to start and stop tomcat, then you will need to update /usr/share/servermgrd/bundles/servermgr_appserver.bundle/Contents/Resources/run.sh

Search is not finding my data AND the indexing process does not appear to be completing. Whats happening?

If you are not seeing pages returned by the search that you expect to be returned, it's most likely that the indexing is not running correctly (either not running or failing). You can check the status of the index processing via the "Administration Console | Administration | Content Indexing" link.

Why could indexing be failing? The indexing process is multi-threaded and therefore has a tendency to consume a lot of resources when running an initial index or reindexing the entire site. So, what can do wrong?

• Some systems do not like the multi-threaded index process. You can set the index process to us only a single thread by setting bucket.indexing.threads.fixed=1
• The index process may also block if there are insufficient available database connections. Increasing the number of connections from 15 to 30 will help in this situation.

For more detailed information, see the Content Index Administration page.

I am trying to install Confluence but the demo-site.zip is missing?

There are some cases where the unzip utility used to unzip the Confluence download will recursively unzip all contained zip files. The demo-site.zip should be located in the WEB-INF\classes\com\atlassian\confluence\setup directory. If it has been extracted, you will see an entities.xml file in this directory instead.

I am trying to compile a plugin, but get an error about the "target release"

When compiling plugins and using version 1.5 of the JDK, the following error may appear:

[javac] javac: target release 1.3 conflicts with default source release 1.5

This is due to the fact that the default target for the plugins is version 1.3 of the JDK, which 1.5 cannot compile for. To fix this, open the src/etc/plugins/build.xml file and change the "1.3" in the following line to "1.5":

<javac destdir="${library}/classes" target="1.3" debug="${debug}" deprecation="false" optimize="false" failonerror="true">

I am getting "404" errors in the Space tree view

If you are browsing a space and looking at the "tree view", 404 errors may appear (or it will display "Loading...") if the base url of your Confluence instance is not set.

You can fix this by going to Administration -> General Configuration, and making sure that the "Base URL" setting is set to the correct address/domain name and path.

I am getting an error message about NoClassDefFoundError when using the Chart macro

The following error may appear when viewing certain pages where the Chart Macro is used:

Caused by: java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError
at org.jfree.chart.ChartFactory.createAreaChart(ChartFactory.java:874)
at com.atlassian.confluence.extra.chart.ChartMacro.getChart(ChartMacro.java:217)
at com.atlassian.confluence.extra.chart.ChartMacro.execute(ChartMacro.java:102)

This is indicative of an out-of-date version of the Chart macro. Make sure you have the latest version and have removed any old versions or dependencies. If you are using Confluence 1.4, it may be a symptom of not having the jfreechart and jcommon JARs in your installation, which are required.

Confluence says "the license you entered was not valid" when I try and register

If this happens, please check your logs. The following message may appear:

2006-03-19 16:32:05,969 ERROR [atlassian.license.decoder.LicenseDecoder] String) Exception looking up public key: null
java.security.spec.InvalidKeySpecException
   at gnu.java.security.provider.DSAKeyFactory.engineGeneratePublic(java.security.spec.KeySpec) (/usr/lib/libgcj.so.6.0.0)
   at java.security.KeyFactory.generatePublic(java.security.spec.KeySpec) (/usr/lib/libgcj.so.6.0.0)
   at com.atlassian.license.decoder.LicenseDecoder.getPublicKey(java.lang.String) (Unknown Source)
   at com.atlassian.license.decoder.LicenseDecoder.getLicense(com.atlassian.license.LicensePair, java.lang.String) (Unknown Source)
   at com.atlassian.license.LicenseManager.setLicense(java.lang.String, java.lang.String) (Unknown Source)
   at com.atlassian.confluence.setup.actions.SetupLicenseAction.validateLicense() (Unknown Source)
   at com.atlassian.confluence.setup.actions.SetupLicenseAction.validate() (Unknown Source)

If you see this, you are most likely using GCJ/Kaffe, which sometimes has problems running Confluence. Please try using the Sun JDK.

I am getting JavaScript errors when using Confluence

If your web browser is complaining about JavaScript errors or functions not being defined, then it is possible that you are not retrieving the latest versions of pages from your Confluence instance.

To fix this, you need to clear your browser cache. Follow the instructions for your particular browser:

• Internet Explorer
• Firefox - Open the Preferences -> Privacy -> Click on the "Clear Cache" button
• Safari - Go to the Safari menu -> Clear Cache

If you are still having problems, please create a support request.