Documentation for Confluence 2.5.4 - 2.5.8.
Documentation for [Confluence Cloud] and the latest Confluence Server is available too.

This document is for Confluence administrators who wish to manage plugins installed in their Confluence server, or install new plugins. Confluence plugins were introduced in Confluence 1.3: for an overview of how plugins work in Confluence, read Confluence Plugin Guide.

Looking for existing plugins? See the existing plugins and extensions written by the community in the Confluence Extensions space.



Confluence versions 1.4. provide the ability for Confluence administrators to upload plugins from their browsers.

Confluence versions 2.0 and later support the Plugin Repository, which provides an alternative way to install and configure plugins with just a few mouse-clicks.



Installing Plugins manually

Plugins are distributed as a jar file. To install a plugin,

  1. Locate the confluence/WEB-INF/lib directory in your Confluence installation. (This is inside the Confluence installation itself, not your configured ConfluenceHome directory).
  2. Remove any previous version of the plugin you may have installed
  3. Copy your plugin jar file into the directory
  4. Restart Confluence
  5. Check the Plugin Administration screen to see if the plugin is available
  6. Enable the plugin if necessary

When you install a Confluence plugin, you should consider:

  • When you upgrade or re-install Confluence, the WEB-INF/lib directory will be overwritten. You should keep a copy of all your installed plugins somewhere outside Confluence, so that you can copy them back in after an upgrade.
  • If you install a Confluence plugin, and Confluence fails to restart (or does not behave correctly after the restart), you can uninstall the plugin by deleting it from the WEB-INF/lib directory.

    Plugin Safety

    Plugins are very powerful: they can change the behaviour of almost any part of the Confluence server. This makes it very important that you trust a plugin before you install it. Always be aware of where (and who) a plugin comes from.



Some plugins will be enabled by default when they are installed. Others will have to be manually enabled from the Plugin Administration screen.

Enabling and Disabling Plugins



Plugins (and their constitutent plugin modules) may be enabled and disabled by the site administrator. You can do this from the Plugins section of the global administration screen. All plugins installed in the Confluence server are listed on the left hand side. To enable or disable a plugin (or its modules) click on the plugin name.
On the right-hand side, a description of the plugin is shown, including its component plugin modules.
You can enable or disable the whole plugin:


Or each module individually:


Disabling a plugin module may cause other modules in the same plugin to cease to function correctly. When in doubt, make sure you disable or enable the entire plugin.



Removing Plugins that prevent Confluence Running

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

Prior to Confluence v2.3
  • Remove the jar file from the <Confluence Home>/plugins directory.
  • Restart Confluence.
In Confluence v2.3 and later
  • Connect to the confluence database.
  • Remove the appropriate row from the PLUGINDATA table.
    Eg suppose the google maps plugin was not working, you would run:
    delete from plugindata where pluginkey = 'com.atlassian.confluence.ext.gmaps'
  • Restart Confluence.





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