Confluence Home and other important directories
Confluence installation directory
The “Confluence Installation directory” is the directory where Confluence was installed. This directory is also sometimes called the 'Confluence Install directory'.
Important files in the installation directory:
bin/setenv.batorbin/setenv.sh
This file is used to edit CATALINA_OPTS memory and garbage collection settings and define system properties.confluence/WEB-INF/classes/confluence-init.properties
This file contains the location of the Confluence Home directory.
On this page:
Confluence home directory
The Confluence Home directory is the folder where Confluence stores its configuration information, search indexes and page attachments. Another term for 'Home directory' would be “data directory”. We also refer to this as the 'local home directory' in Data Center.
Finding the home directory
The location of the Confluence home directory is defined when you install Confluence. This location is stored in the confluence-init.properties file, which is located in the confluence/WEB-INF/classes directory of your Confluence Installation directory.
When Confluence is running you can find the location of the home directory in Administration 
> General Configuration > System Information > Confluence Information - Confluence Home.
If you're using Confluence Data Center (a clustered instance), you will also have a shared home directory which will contain some data (such as attachments and backups) that would otherwise reside in the home directory. The location of your shared home directory can be found in your <local-home>/confluence.cfg.xml file in the confluence.cluster.home property.
Contents of the home directory
The Confluence home directory contains some of the configuration data used by Confluence. This section outlines the purpose of the files and directories in the Confluence home directory.
| File or directory | Purpose |
|---|---|
| This file contains all of the information necessary for Confluence to start up, such as:
|
| This directory contains every version of each attachment stored in Confluence. You can specify an alternative directory for attachment storage by setting the In Data Center this directory is usually found in the Shared Home directory. |
| Confluence will place its daily backup archives in this directory, as well as any manually generated backups. Backup files in this directory take the following form You can specify an alternative directory for backups by setting the In Data Center this directory is usually found in the Shared Home directory. |
| Confluence includes a set of bundled plugins. The bundled-plugins directory is where Confluence will unpack its bundled plugins when it starts up. This directory is refreshed on every restart, so removing a plugin from this directory will not uninstall the plugin, as it will be replaced the next time Confluence starts up. |
| This is where Confluence stores its database when configured to run with the Embedded H2 Database. In such cases this directory contains all Confluence runtime data. Installations configured to run using an external database such as MySQL will not use this directory. The H2 database is provided for evaluating Confluence and is not supported as a production database. |
| The Confluence index is heavily used by the application for content searching and recently updated lists and is critical for a running Confluence instance. If data in this directory is lost or corrupted, it can be restored by running a full reindex from within Confluence. This process can take a long time depending on how much data is stored Confluence's database. An alternative directory may be specified for the index by setting the |
journal/ | Entries are added to the journal when changes occur (such as a comment, like, new page). Journal entries are then processed and the entries added to the index (about every 5 seconds). In a cluster, the journal keeps the indexes on each node in sync. |
logs/ | Confluence's application logs are stored in this directory. |
| All Confluence plugins are stored in the database. To allow for quicker access to classes contained within the plugin JARs, Confluence will cache these plugins in the plugin-cache directory. This directory is updated as plugins are installed and uninstalled from the system and is completely repopulated from the database every time Confluence is restarted. Removing plugins from this directory does not uninstall them. |
| The You can specify a different temp directory location, if necessary. Edit |
| Stores temporary files for image thumbnails. This directory is essentially a thumbnail cache, and files deleted from this directory will be regenerated the next time the image is accessed. In Data Center this directory is usually found in the Shared Home directory. |
shared-home/ | This sub-directory is created in your home directory when you install Confluence Server. If you choose move to Data Center, you'll move the contents of this directory to a separate shared home directory, that is accessible to all nodes. Cache files for some features, including Office document and PDF previews are also stored in this directory (in both Server and Data Center). |
Changing the location of the home directory
When Confluence first starts up, it reads the confluence-init.properties file to determine where to look for the Home directory.
To change the location of the home directory edit the confluence.home property in the confluence-init.properties file as follows:
- Windows
In Windows, the pathC:\confluence\datawould be written as:confluence.home=C:/confluence/data
Note that all backslashes (\) are written as forward slashes (/) - Linux
On any Linux-based system, the property is defined using the normal directory syntax:confluence.home=/var/confluence/
Symbolic links
There can be no symbolic links within the Confluence home directory. You must define an absolute path. If disk space is an issue, place the entire confluence.home directory on a disk partition where there is enough space. The absolute path of generated files (such as exports) is compared with the absolute path of the confluence.home directory when constructing URLs. When a sub-directory has a different path, the URL will be incorrect, and you may receive "Page not found" errors. These measures are in place to prevent "directory traversal" attacks.
Fixing the Confluence Configuration
The Confluence configuration file: confluence-cfg.xml inside the home directory may contain references to the original location of your Confluence home. You will need to edit this file to update these references to also point to the new location. The two properties in this file that need to change are:
daily.backup.dirif you have not configured your backups to be placed elsewhere alreadyhibernate.connection.urlif you are using the embedded HSQL database.
Database
All other data, including page content, is kept in the database. If you installed Confluence as a trial, or chose to use the embedded HSQL database during setup, the database will store its files under database/ in the Confluence Home Directory. Otherwise, the database management system you are connecting to is responsible for where and how your remaining data is stored.
Temp directory (installation directory)
The temp directory in the installation directory is set by CATALINA_TMPDIR. This is different from the Java runtime temp directory. However, the java.io.tempDir defaults to CATALINA_TMPDIR. You can change its location by following these steps:
1. Create the temporary directory
The directory should be on the local disk for optimal performance, have sufficient free space, and allow all necessary permissions to the user starting the Confluence process.
- Create a new directory where you want to move the
tmpdir. - Ensure that the user running the Confluence process has full access to this directory. You can set the permissions using the following commands:
$ chown -R confluence <new-tmpdir-path>
$ chmod -R u=rwx,go-rwx <new-tmpdir-path>2. Customize the setenv.sh file
- To customize the
java.io.tmpdirpath, edit the<CONFLUENCE_INSTALLATION_DIR>/bin/setenv.shfile. - Add or update the following line below the
JVM_SUPPORT_RECOMMENDED_ARGS:
CATALINA_TMPDIR='/your/custom/path/here'If a CATALINA_TMPDIR line already exists, update it instead of adding a new line.
3. Restart Confluence
- Restart Confluence to apply the changes and start using the new
tmpdir. - If you are running a Data Center cluster, perform a rolling restart one node at a time.