Confluence home directory contents

The Confluence home directory contains data that work in concert with the Confluence database to provide the wiki experience. This document outlines the purpose of the various files and directories in the Confluence home directory.
Tip: Another term for 'Home directory' would be 'data directory'.

Files and directories

confluence.cfg.xml

This file is the most critical file in the Confluence home directory. It contains all of the information necessary for Confluence to start up such as:

• Product license
• Context path
• Database details such as location and connection pool settings
• Paths to important directories

attachments

This directory contains every version of each attachment stored in Confluence. This directory is not used when Confluence is configured to store attachments in the database. Attachments are always stored in the database in clustered instances of Confluence.

Paths within this directory have the following structure:

/attachments/PAGE_ID/ATTACHMENT_ID/VERSION

An alternative directory may be specified for attachment storage by setting the attachments.dir property in confluence.cfg.xml

backups

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:

daily-backup-YYYY_MM_DD.zip

An alternative directory may be specified for backups by setting the daily.backup.dir property in confluence.cfg.xml.

bundled-plugins

Recent versions of Confluence ship with a set of bundled plugins. These are plugins written by the Atlassian and the Confluence community that we think provide useful and broadly applicable functionality in Confluence. 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; it will simply be replaced the next time Confluence starts up.

database

This is where Confluence stores its database when configured to run with the HSQL embedded database and as such contains all Confluence runtime data. Instances configured to run using an external database such as MySQL will not use this directory.

index

This is where Confluence stores its indexes for rapid retrieval of often used data. The Confluence index is used heavily by the application for content searching and recently updated lists and as such is critical for a running Confluence instance. It is important to note however that should the data in this directory be lost or corrupted, it can be restored by running a full reindex from within Confluence. This 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 lucene.index.dir property in confluence.cfg.xml. As this is the most heavily accessed directory in the Confluence home directory you might want to consider hosting it on the fastest disk available. It would also be useful if the disk holding the Confluence index was not heavily used by any other application to reduce access contention.

plugin-cache

As of Confluence 2.3, all Confluence plugins are now stored in the Confluence 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. As such, removing plugins from this directory does not uninstall them.

resources

The resources directory stores any space logos used in your Confluence instance. For each space with a space logo, there is a directory within resources named after the space's key. That directory contains the space's logo.

temp

The temp directory is used for various runtime functions such as exporting, importing, file upload and indexing. As the name suggests, and file in this directory is of temporary importance and is only used during runtime. This directory can be safely emptied when Confluence is offline.

An alternative directory may be specified for temporary data by setting the webwork.multipart.saveDir property in confluence.cfg.xml.

thumbnails

When Confluence generates a thumbnail of an image (for example when the gallery macro is used), the resulting thumbnail is stored in this directory for quicker retrieval on subsequent accesses. This directory is essentially a thumbnail cache, and deleting files from this directory simply means the thumbnail will have to be regenerated on the next access.

Confluence 2.2 and older

The following files and directories were used by versions of Confluence older than 2.3

config

The config directory is used to store data used by Confluence's bandana data persistence framework. This system is used by Confluence to store the global instance settings and is used by various plugins for their own configuration and data persistence needs. Confluence versions 2.3 and later store these data in the Confluence database and do not use this directory.

The most important file in this directory is the confluence-global.bandana.xml file. This file is used to store all of the settings from the Administration console in Confluence.

plugins

The plugins directory is where Confluence stores all installed plugin JARs. It is possible to install and remove plugins by placing and deleting plugin JARs from this directory.

default-formatting.properties

This properties file contains various formatting information such as the formats for decimal numbers and dates used in the Confluence user interface. These configuration data where relocated to the Confluence database from Confluence 2.3 and onwards.