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This page contains instructions on how to set up a MySQL datasource connection for Confluence Standalone or EAR/WAR.

On this page:

1. Shut down Tomcat

Run bin/shutdown.sh or bin/shutdown.bat to bring Tomcat down while you are making these changes

Make a backup of your <CONFLUENCE_HOME>/confluence.cfg.xml file and your <CONFLUENCE_INSTALL>/conf/server.xml file so you can easily revert should their be a problem.

2. Install the Drivers

Download the MySQL JDBC drivers from http://www.mysql.com/downloads/api-jdbc-stable.html.
After unpacking the file you have downloaded, you'll find a file called something like mysql-connector-java-3.0.10-stable-bin.jar.
Copy this file into the common/lib directory of your Tomcat installation. Be aware that this directory may be just lib for Tomcat version 6 and beyond (i.e. <tomcat-install>/lib rather than <tomcat-install>/common/lib).

3. Configure Tomcat

If you are using the Standalone distribution. edit the conf/server.xml file in your Tomcat installation. Users running their own Tomcat instance must edit the xml file where they declared the Confluence Context descriptor.

If editing conf/server.xml, find the following lines:

<Context path="" docBase="../confluence" debug="0" reloadable="true">
                    <!-- Logger is deprecated in Tomcat 5.5. Logging configuration for Confluence is specified in confluence/WEB-INF/classes/log4j.properties -->

Within the Context tags, directly after the opening <Context.../> line, insert the DataSource Resource tag:

<Resource name="jdbc/confluence" auth="Container" type="javax.sql.DataSource"
         username="yourusername"
         password="yourpassword"
         driverClassName="com.mysql.jdbc.Driver"
         url="jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/confluence?autoReconnect=true&useUnicode=true&characterEncoding=utf8"
         maxActive="15"
         maxIdle="7"
         validationQuery="Select 1" />

Replace the username and password parameters with the correct values for your database
In the url parameter, replace the word 'confluence' with the name of the database your confluence data will be stored in.
If you plan to use non-latin characters, you will also need to add "&useUnicode=true&characterEncoding=utf8" on the end of the above URL. These options are not required for any database other than MySQL.

The Confluence database connection URL must have autoReconnect=true added to the end to prevent disconnection issues.

When a database server reboots, or there is a network failure, all the connections in the connection pool are broken and this normally requires a Application Server reboot.

However, the Commons DBCP (Database Connection Pool) which is used by the Tomcat application server can validate connections before issuing them by running a simple SQL query, and if a broken connection is detected, a new one is created to replace it. To do this, you will need to set the "validationQuery" option on the database connection pool.

If switching from a direct JDBC connection to datasource, you can find the above details in your <CONFLUENCE_HOME>/confluence.cfg.xml file.

The configuration properties for Tomcat's standard data source resource factory (org.apache.tomcat.dbcp.dbcp.BasicDataSourceFactory) are as follows:

driverClassName — Fully qualified Java class name of the JDBC driver to be used.
maxActive — The maximum number of active instances that can be allocated from this pool at the same time.
maxIdle — The maximum number of connections that can sit idle in this pool at the same time.
maxWait — The maximum number of milliseconds that the pool will wait (when there are no available connections) for a connection to be returned before throwing an exception.
password — Database password to be passed to our JDBC driver.
url — Connection URL to be passed to our JDBC driver. (For backwards compatibility, the property driverName is also recognized.)
user — Database username to be passed to our JDBC driver.
validationQuery — SQL query that can be used by the pool to validate connections before they are returned to the application. If specified, this query MUST be an SQL SELECT statement that returns at least one row.

4. Configure the Confluence web application

Edit confluence/WEB-INF/web.xml in your confluence installation

Go to the end of the file and just before </web-app>, insert the following:

<resource-ref>
        <description>Connection Pool</description>
        <res-ref-name>jdbc/confluence</res-ref-name>
        <res-type>javax.sql.Datasource</res-type>
        <res-auth>Container</res-auth>
    </resource-ref>

5. Configure Confluence

If you have not yet set up Confluence
1. Follow the steps in the Confluence Setup Guide
2. In the Database Setup section, choose the "Datasource Connection" option.
3. Set the JNDI name to java:comp/env/jdbc/confluence
4. Set the Database dialect to MySQL.

If you are changing an existing Confluence installation over to using a Tomcat datasource

Find your ConfluenceHome directory (see: Confluence Home Directory if you don't know where it is).
Edit the confluence.cfg.xml file
Delete any line that contains a property that begins with hibernate.

Insert the following at the start of the <properties> section.

<property name="hibernate.setup"><![CDATA[true]]></property>
    <property name="hibernate.dialect"><![CDATA[net.sf.hibernate.dialect.MySQLDialect]]></property>
    <property name="hibernate.connection.datasource"><![CDATA[java:comp/env/jdbc/confluence]]></property>

6. Restart Confluence

Run bin/startup.sh or bin/startup.bat to start Tomcat with the new settings.

F.A.Q.

I see "Can't call commit when autocommit=true" during an upgrade of Confluence or otherwise.
Please see http://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONF-1710. This error can be fixed by adding:
&relaxAutoCommit=true
to the end of your JDBC URL.
Example:
jdbc:mysql://localhost/confdb?autoReconnect=true&relaxAutoCommit=true
This JDBC URL can be found in your confluence.cfg.xml file located in your confluence home folder.