Symptoms

User is not able to login to Confluence despite the correct username and password. The following appears in the System Error page and atlassian-confluence.log:

java.lang.NullPointerException
	at com.atlassian.confluence.user.crowd.DefaultApplicationCache.toCacheValue(DefaultApplicationCache.java:70)
	at com.atlassian.confluence.user.crowd.DefaultApplicationCache.putApplication(DefaultApplicationCache.java:55)
	at com.atlassian.confluence.user.crowd.CachedCrowdApplicationDao.findByName(CachedCrowdApplicationDao.java:48)
	at com.atlassian.crowd.embedded.core.CrowdEmbeddedApplicationFactory.getApplication(CrowdEmbeddedApplicationFactory.java:26)
	at com.atlassian.crowd.embedded.core.CrowdServiceImpl.getApplication(CrowdServiceImpl.java:838)
	at com.atlassian.crowd.embedded.core.CrowdServiceImpl.authenticate(CrowdServiceImpl.java:60)
	at com.atlassian.crowd.embedded.atlassianuser.EmbeddedCrowdAuthenticator.authenticate(EmbeddedCrowdAuthenticator.java:30)
	at bucket.user.DefaultUserAccessor.authenticate(DefaultUserAccessor.java:589)

Cause

This is caused by an inconsistent data of User Directories in Confluence database - i.e. cwd_app_dir_mapping table. This inconsistency could be caused by a failure on User Directory creation or deletion.

Resolution

1. Run the following SQL query against Confluence database:

   SELECT * FROM cwd_app_dir_mapping ORDER BY 5;

2. Check if there is an incorrect User Directory order in LIST_INDEX column. For example, a result of the above query will look something like this:

   ID;APPLICATION_ID;DIRECTORY_ID;ALLOW_ALL;LIST_INDEX
   12779521;8290305;12746753;T;0
   13041665;8290305;13008897;T;1
   10780673;8290305;10747905;T;2
   10387459;8290305;10354691;T;3
   11698177;8290305;11665409;T;4
   10158081;8290305;10125313;T;5
   8355841;8290305;8323073;T;7

   Note the last line. The LIST_INDEX should be 6 instead 7. This is the culprit behind this issue and we'll just need to correct it

3. From the above example, you can correct it by running the following SQL query:

   UPDATE cwd_app_dir_mapping
   SET LIST_INDEX=6
   WHERE ID=8355841;

4. Restart Confluence