This page last changed on Jan 31, 2007 by jnolen.

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.

ich have installed a Macroplugin in confluence 1.3.5, and confluence restart.
but confluence can not find my macro .
only four plugins are always shown
Basic Macros,Advanced Macros, HTML Macros and compatibility Macros.
but others plugins are not , why???????????????????????????????????????????????

Posted by at May 31, 2005 12:23

Hi, I thought I was having the same problem, and it turned out I was uploading into the wrong directory.

If you're running Confluence and Jira together, you probably (as suggested) copied the /confluence/ folder into the location where Jira is installed. so you should be putting your plugin's there!

just double check

Posted by at Jul 15, 2005 13:23

oops, I meant to reply.. (see comment below)

Posted by at Jul 15, 2005 13:23

so now I'm really having your problem.

Did you ever remove a plugin (jar file)? that seems to mess things up. (confluence 1.3) if I do that, my list goes from:

  • Task List Macros
  • JIRA Macros
  • Basic Macros
  • Layout Macros
  • Advanced Macros
  • User List Macros
  • HTML Macros
  • Information Macros
  • Compatibility Macros

to:

  • Basic Macros
  • Advanced Macros
  • HTML Macros
  • Compatibility Macros

very strange. you'll notice confluence\WEB-INF\classes\plugins
has xml files for exactly (and only) those 4 plugins. It's probably not a coincidence.

The good news is that if you replace the macro you removed from the lib dir everything works again. (if you don't know what you removed, you could try adding xml files in that \plugins dir)

Posted by sebastian at Jul 21, 2005 08:37

this only happens in 1.3, in 1.4 everything works fine.

Posted by sebastian at Jul 21, 2005 11:25

The plugin uninstall process was fixed as part of 1.4.

Posted by daniel@atlassian.com at Jul 21, 2005 21:06

 
For the gtalk macro at http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/CONFEXT/Google+Talk+Macro:
 
Instructions indicated that plugins are distributed as a jar file. We don't have a jar file but a zip file that unzips not jar file but meta-inf stuff, images, templates and a com directory.
 

Posted by smithcw at May 16, 2006 13:12

I guess you might be using Internet Explorer. This is because subversion gives no content-type and as JARs are simply structured zip's then it assumes its a zip you have. This is a problem you will have with downloading many different types of files from a subversion repository.

Simply right click and save as "gtalk.jar".

Posted by dhardiker@adaptavist.com at May 16, 2006 13:16

Okay, I'm being a real newbie here, but I have the demo version of Confluence installed right now, and I wanted to download the Content Formatting Macros.  I understand from this page pretty much what I need to do, but when I downloaded what was supposedly a .jar file containing the macros, it instead gave me a zipped folder that had no .jar files within.  So how do I install it?  Thanks!

Posted by cmurtaugh at May 18, 2006 18:59

You're using Intenet Exploder which silently renames .jar files to .zip files (thanks Microsoft!). To get round the problem, simply rename it from a .zip to a .jar, then upload it using the Plugin Manager in Confluence's Administration Console.

Posted by gfraser at May 18, 2006 19:03

Thanks a lot, that did the trick!

Posted by cmurtaugh at May 18, 2006 19:16

I see references to both <Confluence Home>/plugins, and confluence/WEB-INF/lib in the install directory. As of 2.3.1, which is correct? And which will continue to be so?

I ask because my attempt to "scan" the <Confluence Home>/plugins directory did not result in finding plugins and I am attempting to desern if it is one of the little oddities of the conversion of if it is no-longer in use.

Posted by jeffreyheinen at Feb 13, 2007 12:32

There is also <Confluence Home>/bundled-plugins, is that scanned as well? Should we also remove items from this directory in the event we want to upgrade plugins?

Posted by jeffreyheinen at Feb 13, 2007 12:33
Document generated by Confluence on Mar 22, 2007 21:00