Confluence goes to some lengths to prevent itself being unusable due to a problematic plugin. However, sometimes a plugin will manage to do this anyway. This page describes what to do if a plugin cannot be disabled or deleted from the Administration console (from Administration >> Plugins).

Plugin Loading Strategies

1. Read through Plugin loading strategies in Confluence.
2. Determine where your plugin is loaded. The usual options are:
   1. The PLUGINDATA table on the database
   2. The <confluence-home>/bundled-plugins folder
   3. The <confluence-home>/plugin-cache folder
   4. The <confluence-home>/plugins-osgi-cache folder
   5. The <confluence-home>/plugins-temp folder
   6. The <confluence-install>/confluence/WEB-INF/lib folder (deprecated approach)

Check these locations when troubleshooting plugin loading issues.

Deleting a plugin from the Database

To remove a plugin from Confluence when Confluence is not running:

1. Connect to the Confluence database.
2. Run the following SQL statement in your database:

   select plugindataid, pluginkey,filename,lastmoddate from plugindata;

3. After you have found the plugindataid for the offending plugin, please run the following:

   delete from plugindata where plugindataid='XXXXXX';

   where XXXXXX is the plugindataid value.
4. Restart Confluence.

Deleting a Bundled Plugin

If you need to remove a bundled plugin, check to see if you have duplicates in the <confluence-home>/bundled-plugins or <confluence-home>/plugin-cache directory.

Usually, the problem is that an old plugin is getting loaded along with the properly bundled one, but if you need to remove a bundled plugin, check Plugin loading strategies in Confluence.