This page last changed on Apr 05, 2007 by david.soul@atlassian.com.
Please ensure you have completed the Initial development environment setup properly before following this guide
This page is useful for academic and open-source customers who do not have access to the Confluence source distribution. If you are a commercial customer, you should download the Confluence source and follow these instructions.

Getting the EAR/WAR distribution

  1. Download the latest EAR/WAR distribution release of Confluence and expand it to a location on your hard disk (we'll call it '$CONFBASE')
  2. Download confluence-dist.zip file, which contains stripped-down project files for Maven, expand it and copy it's contents into root of your Confluence release ($CONFBASE).
  3. Open the contained build.properties file in a text editor and adjust it to meet your environment settings. In particular, pay attention to the following:
    • JDK Version - This should be set to whatever your target JDK is called in IDEA. On Mac OS X, this is usually '1.4' or '1.5' (without quotes). Eg:
      atlassian.idea.jdk.name=1.4
    • Application Server Settings - Uncomment these and point to your app server installation. Only uncomment the ones you actually have installed. Eg:
      atlassian.idea.tomcat.location=~/apache-tomcat-5.5.12
      #atlassian.idea.resin3.location=$PATH_TO_MY_INSTALLATION
      #atlassian.idea.resin.location=$PATH_TO_MY_INSTALLATION
      #atlassian.idea.orion.location=$PATH_TO_MY_INSTALLATION
      
    • Application Settings - The settings in which your application server will launch confluence. The settings below will allow you to access the running server at http://localhost:8080/confluence:
      # port on which Confluence will listen
      atlassian.idea.application.port=8080
      # the context root at which Confluence will be deployed
      atlassian.idea.application.webapp.contextpath=confluence
      

Creating the IDEA project files

  1. Open a command prompt and enter the following:
    cd $CONFBASE
    maven atlassian-idea
    
  2. That's it! Now just open up the freshly-generated 'confluence.ipr' file in IDEA. It should look something like this:

Setting up the Confluence environment

Once the project is loaded, you will need to set up where the 'confluence home' is.

  1. Open confluence/WEB-INF/classes/confluence-init.properties
  2. Set the 'confluence.home' property to the location you want confluence data stored. An example might be $CONFBASE/confluence/home, or somewhere in your home directory. If the location doesn't exist, Confluence will try to create it when you run the webapp.

Compiling and running Confluence

Now that it's set up, we should make sure it's all working by getting it to run inside IDEA.

  1. Click the 'confluence' module and then select 'Build > Make Project' from the menu. Alternately, click the button.
  2. From the drop-down beside the button, select your app server (eg. 'Tomcat').
  3. Click the button next to the app server drop-down.

The most common problem here is that the JDK has not been set up correctly. If you have a problem, check the following:

  1. Right-click on the 'confluence' module in the project window and select 'Module Settings' at the bottom of the popup-window.
  2. Select the 'Libraries' tab
  3. Check that a valid JDK has been selected for the module.
  4. Check the other modules in the project for the same.

What's Next?

Now that we've got Confluence running, we can start working on plugins.


project_structure.png (image/png)
confluence-dist.zip (application/zip)
debug.png (image/png)
make_project.png (image/png)
run.png (image/png)
Document generated by Confluence on Oct 10, 2007 18:36