This page last changed on Mar 05, 2007 by ivan@atlassian.com.

Confluence EAR/WAR Requirements

The EAR-WAR edition of Confluence is intended for deployment into an existing J2EE application server. It is assumed that you already know how to deploy a webapp on the application server of choice. If not, we recommend installing the Confluence Standalone Edition.

  • If you are not confident with application server configuration, please contact your system administrator to assist you before proceeding or consider installing Confluence Standalone
  • If deploying to an application server other than Apache Tomcat server, review the Application Server Configuration guide.
  • If deploying as an unexploded WAR, Ant 1.3 or later is required
  • If deploying on an unsupported servers, server-related issues cannot be covered by Atlassian technical support. Requests for assistance can be directed to the user forums instead
  • Confluence, the database and application server must use the same character encoding. UTF-8 is recommended
  • A user-contributed Fedora or RHEL/Centos Install Guide is also available for reference
  • Unix, Linux or Solaris users must install these X11 libraries

Before installing the WAR version of Confluence, please go through this checklist of requirements.

Instructions on how to install the WAR version on Tomcat

Step 1 - Download and extract WAR

  1. Download the Confluence WAR zip file
  2. Extract the downloaded zip file. It should extract to a folder called confluence-<version>. Inside this folder you'll find a folder called "confluence". Make a note of the absolute path to this directory (as you will need to use it later).

    Do not copy the confluence folder to the webapps folder inside tomcat - this may cause Confluence to be deployed more than once.

    Windows users avoid Win XP's built in unzip as it doesn't extract all the files. Use a 3rd party zip extractor like WinZip.
    Solaris users will need to use GNU tar to handle the long filenames.

Step 2 - Check for patches

Review the Release Notes for your Confluence version and apply any patches listed

Step 3 - Configure confluence-init.properties

  1. Open confluence/WEB-INF/classes/confluence-init.properties in a text editor
  2. Set the confluence.homeproperty to a directory of your choosing. This is the directory that will contain all of Confluence's configuration, backup and attachment files.

Step 4 - Edit Tomcat context descriptors

If you using Tomcat 5.0.x or Tomcat 5.5.x:

  1. Create a file called confluence.xml in your Tomcat installation's conf/Catalina/localhost directory (if you have set up a different hostname for your tomcat instance, please specify that instead of localhost)
  2. Open confluence.xml and add these lines:
    <Context path="/confluence" docBase="c:/applications/confluence-2.1.3/confluence" debug="0" reloadable="true">
    <Logger className="org.apache.catalina.logger.FileLogger"
    prefix="atlassian-confluence." suffix=".log" timestamp="true"/>
    </Context>

  3. For docBase specify the value you noted down earlier.

If you are using Tomcat 4.x

  1. Open conf/server.xml in a text editor
  2. Add the following:
    <Context path="/confluence" docBase="c:/applications/confluence-2.1.3/confluence" debug="0" reloadable="true">
    <Logger className="org.apache.catalina.logger.FileLogger"
    prefix="atlassian-confluence." suffix=".log" timestamp="true"/>
    </Context>

  3. For docBase specify the value you noted down earlier.

Step 5 - Configure Your Application server

Review any documentation associated with your webserver here. If your application server requires deploying Confluence as a EAR/WAR:

To build the WAR File:

Windows users

Linux users

Step 6 - Restart Server

  1. Shut down, and then restart tomcat
  2. Confluence should now be accessible on http://host:port/confluence

Next Step

Setup Confluence

General Tips & Information

Troubleshooting

Solutions to common issues with installing Confluence. Click on a problem to show the solution.

Confluence window closes immediately when started

Confluence won't start - java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError IntraHibernateAttachmentCopier

Confluence won't start - Error creating Confluence Home directory

Confluence won't start - JAVA_HOME environment variable is not defined correctly

Confluence won't start - Port 8080 is in use

Confluence won't start - Error creating bean with name 'scheduler'

Confluence won't start - Error registering bean with name 'fileSystemAttachmentDataDao'

Confluence starts but localhost:8080 times out

Confluence starts but localhost:8080 goes to Tomcat start homepage

Confluence starts but logins fail at login screen


RELATED TOPICS

Confluence Cluster Installation
Configuration Guide
Confluence Setup Guide
Confluence Documentation Home


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An important note concerning logging and Tomcat 5.5 in the Tomcat 5.5 documentation:

"An important consequence for Tomcat 5.5 is that the <Logger> element found in previous versions to create a localhost_log is no longer a valid nested element of <Context>. Instead, the default Tomcat configuration will use java.util.logging. If the developer wishes to collect detailed internal Tomcat logging (i.e what is happening within the Tomcat engine), then they should configure a logging system such as java.util.logging or log4j as detailed next."

So if you're installing Confluence to run under Tomcat 5.5, don't include the Logger element in the Context container. 

Posted by sprater at Feb 03, 2006 13:19

In my installation I wanted Confluence to the Tomcat's default application, so that a request to the server "root" (http://domain/) would get a response from Confluence. Here is an example of a configuration that achieves that objective:

http://toklas.org/display/sa/5.3+Confluence+as+the+Default+Application

Posted by lrtalley at Feb 11, 2006 21:12

It's asking for login details...

Posted by gfraser at Feb 11, 2006 21:19

You configure this through the Tomcat server.xml file. There will be a <context> tag with an empty path attribute. Change this context to point to your Confluence webapp.

http://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-5.5-doc/config/context.html

Posted by mryall at Feb 13, 2006 00:06

Don't forget to set the JAVA_OPTS such that at least 256MB can be used by java (-Xmx256m)0

Posted by ltcraben at May 02, 2006 18:24

Is there a reason the deployment isn't done through the "Tomcat Web Application Manager"? Presumably, that would be the next step following the "Build WAR" warning panel??

  • Oli (the Tomcat noob)
Posted by olivier_dagenais@canada.com at Sep 19, 2006 20:58

If you do point to

docBase="c:/applications/confluence-2.1.3/confluence"

you'll get a blank directory. Should point to the $CONFLUENCE.war file instead.

Posted by yanchenko at Dec 04, 2006 18:19

Users running Debian / Ubuntu & Confluence up to ver.2.2.10 should updatecglib as otherwise exceptions during installation are expected.

Posted by yanchenko at Dec 05, 2006 00:22

How do I go about building an EAR file instead of a WAR file? I've just been informed it's a requirement for our systems. I thought they were the same thing!

Posted by honconftest at Jan 19, 2007 13:24

Ok, answer is to run "build ear" instead of "build". Works great. Thanks to Donna in live support on that one!

Posted by honconftest at Jan 19, 2007 13:49

So I kept getting 'NoClassDefFoundError' faults for apache along with errors about setting up logging. The logging setup errors were:

log4j:WARN No appenders could be found for logger (com.atlassian.confluence.lifecycle).
log4j:WARN Please initialize the log4j system properly.

The NoClassDefFound erros looked like this:

java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: org/apache/commons/logging/LogFactory.
java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: org/apache/commons/codec/DecoderException

It turned out these were all being caused by having some jakarta commons-* libraries in my orion lib directory (I'd been using them on another project, they were not recommended by any Atlassian install process). The files were:

commons-email-1.0.jar
commons-httpclient-3.0.1.jar
commons-logging-1.0.4.jar

So I removed all three and confluence worked fine but JIRA stopped working. I then moved the commons-logging-x to the JIRA/WEB-INF/lib directory and JIRA started working fine.

Now onto http access into subversion...

Posted by william.crighton at Mar 09, 2007 08:36
Document generated by Confluence on Mar 22, 2007 20:56