Confluence goes to some lengths to prevent itself being unusable due to a problematic add-on. However, sometimes an add-on will manage to do this anyway. This page describes what to do if an add-on cannot be disabled or deleted from the administration console (from Administration > Manage Add-ons). 

Add-on Loading Strategies

  1. Read through .
  2. Determine where your add-on file is located. The usual locations 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 add-on loading issues.

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

Deleting an add-on from the Database

To remove an add-on 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 value for the offending add-on, run the following:

    delete from PLUGINDATA where plugindataid='XXXXXX';

    where XXXXXX is the plugindataid value.

  4. Restart Confluence.
Disabling an add-on from the database

To disable the add-on 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 Add-on

If you need to remove a bundled add-on, 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 add-on is getting loaded along with the properly bundled one, but if you need to remove a bundled add-on, check Add-on loading strategies in Confluence.