Can not turn read-only mode off from the UI
Platform Notice: Data Center - This article applies to Atlassian products on the Data Center platform.
Note that this knowledge base article was created for the Data Center version of the product. Data Center knowledge base articles for non-Data Center-specific features may also work for Server versions of the product, however they have not been tested. Support for Server* products ended on February 15th 2024. If you are running a Server product, you can visit the Atlassian Server end of support announcement to review your migration options.
*Except Fisheye and Crucible
Summary
Confluence administrators are sometimes unable to turn off read-only mode from the UI.
For whatever reason sometimes the change is not applied to the installation files.
Diagnosis
When checking the <local-home>/confluence.cfg.xml file for each node you will see that at least one of them shows the following:
<property name="access.mode">READ_ONLY</property>If you try to change it to READ_WRITE it will change back to read-only after restarting the application.
You might also see the following in the atlassian-confluence.log:
2020-09-03 16:49:42,903 INFO [http-nio2-6743-exec-6] [atlassian.confluence.cluster.DefaultClusterConfigurationHelper] lambda$saveSharedProperty$6 Saving access.mode into the shared confluence.cfg.xml file...
2020-09-03 16:49:42,908 INFO [http-nio2-6743-exec-6] [atlassian.confluence.cluster.DefaultClusterConfigurationHelper] lambda$saveSharedProperty$6 Finished writing access.mode into the shared confluence.cfg.xml file
Cause
The READ_ONLY flag is also set in the <shared-home>/confluence.cfg.xml file.
Solution
Update the confluence.cfg.xml file in the shared home directory and change the access.mode property to READ_WRITE. It should look like this:
<property name="access.mode">READ_WRITE</property>This requires Confluence to be restarted.