Installing Confluence & Migrating the Database to MySQL or PostgreSQL

This article explains the process of installing Confluence on your own server and then later migrating your content and settings from the “evaluation” database to something more professional such as MySQL or PostgreSQL. This article is basically an example with sensible assumptions. We’re using CentOS 7.

When you first get Confluence, you probably downloaded it and installed it (or will install it) using the evaluation license. Once you’ve evaluated it, you will need to back it up, reinstall it and restore your content and settings from the backup. It’s stupid but how it works.

All references in this article are available here on the AGIX blog (where you are now).

Having been through this process countless times, i can confidently say i have found the issues and discuss the solutions in this article.

Here’s the example we’re going to walk through.

1. Sally has been asked to install Confluence as a test-case to see if it works as the business needs. She goes to “https://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/download“, downloads the installation file and begins the installation.
2. She decides to put an Apache Reverse Proxy (doing SSL termination) in-front of her Confluence server to be on the safe side. She uses this article for the Apache settings and another article for the Confluence settings needed to accommodate Apache.
3. She checks to see if her server has enough resources. The minimum requirements are as follows. Double it to have a nice experience. Not enough resources and things will fail to happen and errors will occur.
   1. 4x CPU cores,
   2. 6GB RAM, and
   3. 10GB free disk space.
4. During installation, she is asked to select from evaluation or production. Evaluation doesn’t require a license while production does.
5. Sally has everything working as she likes (see how to do the post installation steps here) and is then asked to put it into production.
6. She purchases a production license from “https://www.atlassian.com/buy“.
7. She takes a backup by clicking “General Administration -> Backup & Restore” and then shuts down the Confluence server by issuing the “/opt/atlassian/confluence/bin/stop-confluence.sh” command. She verifies there are no “java” processes running by issuing the “ps aux | grep java” command. She then takes a snapshot of the virtual machine that Confluence is installed on (if it is). Finally she moves aside the two key directories being “/opt/atlassian/confluence/” and “/var/atlassian/application-data/confluence” for safe keeping. She didn’t delete those locations because she knows that backups are locates in “/var/atlassian/application-data/confluence/backups/”.
8. She decides to use PostgreSQL (or MySQL) using the PostgreSQL guide here.
9. Sally then initiates the same installation process (using the same install program that she downloaded originally) but this time she selects the “production” installation. She enters her license key that she got from “https://my.atlassian.com/product“.
10. Sally takes this chance to copy the latest backup from the old installation location to the new restore location which is at “/var/atlassian/application-data/confluence/restore”.
11. Back at the web portal, she is asked to specify the type of database to connect to. Again she refers to this article for database related matters.
12. She completes the login process and now is asked if she wants to restore from backups. She goes ahead and restores from backups. At this point everything is completes.