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.

Check the How to display classpath utility for tips on what's loading, and the Knowledge Base Article on plugin malfunctioning.

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.
Disabling a plugin from the database

To disable in the database,

Run the following query on your Confluence database:

select BANDANAVALUE from BANDANA where BANDANAKEY = 'plugin.manager.state.Map'

This will return a value like:

<map>
  <entry>
    <string>com.atlassian.confluence.ext.usage</string>
    <boolean>true</boolean>
  </entry>
</map>

Edit the value boolean to have false:

<map>
  <entry>
    <string>com.atlassian.confluence.ext.usage</string>
    <boolean>false</boolean>
  </entry>
</map>
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.