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

On this page:

1. Install the Driver

  1. Download the PostgreSQL driver from http://jdbc.postgresql.org/download.html.
  2. 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).

If you are using Confluence 3.2.0 or later you can get the driver from /confluence/WEB-INF/lib/postgresql-8.4-701.jdbc3.jar and move it into the common/lib directory of your Tomcat installation.

2. Shut down Tomcat

  1. 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.

3. Configure Tomcat

  1. Firstly, you need to edit <confluence install>/conf/server.xml and 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 -->
  2. 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="postgres"
          password="postgres"
          driverClassName="org.postgresql.Driver"
          url="jdbc:postgresql://localhost:5432/test"
          maxActive="20"
          maxIdle="10"
          validationQuery="select 1" />
    • Replace the username and password parameters with the correct values for your database
    • In the url parameter, replace the word 'yourDatabaseName' with the name of the database your confluence data will be stored in.

Why is the validationQuery element needed?

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

  1. Edit /confluence/WEB-INF/web.xml in your confluence installation
  2. 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 Postgres.
  • If you are changing an existing Confluence installation over to using a Tomcat datasource
    1. Edit the <confluence home>/confluence.cfg.xml file
    2. Delete any line that contains a property that begins with hibernate.
    3. Insert the following at the start of the <properties> section. 
      <property name="hibernate.setup"><![CDATA[true]]></property>
<property name="hibernate.dialect"><![CDATA[org.postgresql.Driver]]></property>
<property name="hibernate.connection.datasource"><![CDATA[java:comp/env/jdbc/confluence]]></property>
    4. Restart Confluence.
RELATED TOPICS

Configuring a MySQL Datasource in Apache Tomcat

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