Confluence goes to some lengths to prevent itself being unusable due to a problematic add-on. However, sometimes an add-on will manage to do this anyway. This page describes what to do if an add-on cannot be disabled or deleted from the administration console (from Administration > Manage Add-ons). 

(warning) The information on this page does not apply to Confluence OnDemand.

Add-on Loading Strategies

  1. Read through Plugin loading strategies in Confluence.
  2. Determine where your add-on file is located. The usual locations are:
    1. The PLUGINDATA table on the database
    2. The <confluence-home>/bundled-plugins folder
    3. The <confluence-home>/plugin-cache folder
    4. The <confluence-home>/plugins-osgi-cache folder
    5. The <confluence-home>/plugins-temp folder
    6. The <confluence-install>/confluence/WEB-INF/lib folder (deprecated approach)

Check these locations when troubleshooting add-on loading issues.

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Check the How do I display the Confluence System Classpath? FAQ and the Knowledge Base Article on plugin loading problems for more information on troubleshooting add-on loading issues.

Deleting an add-on from the Database

To remove an add-on from Confluence when Confluence is not running,

  1. Connect to the Confluence database.
  2. Run the following SQL statement in your database:

    select plugindataid, pluginkey, filename, lastmoddate from PLUGINDATA;
    
  3. After you have found the plugindataid value for the offending add-on, run the following:

    delete from PLUGINDATA where plugindataid='XXXXXX';
    

    where XXXXXX is the plugindataid value.

  4. Restart Confluence.
Disabling an add-on from the database

To disable the add-on in the database,

Run the following query on your Confluence database:

select BANDANAVALUE from BANDANA where BANDANAKEY = 'plugin.manager.state.Map'

This will return a value like:

<map>
  <entry>
    <string>com.atlassian.confluence.ext.usage</string>
    <boolean>true</boolean>
  </entry>
</map>

Edit the value boolean to have false:

<map>
  <entry>
    <string>com.atlassian.confluence.ext.usage</string>
    <boolean>false</boolean>
  </entry>
</map>
Deleting a Bundled Add-on

Bundled add-ons can be administered from the Manage Add-ons page in the application's Administration Console. You can upload or disable them there.

Bundled add-ons are included in a ZIP archive of JAR files called atlassian-bundled-plugins.zip, which is on the main Confluence classpath, in a resources directory - <confluence-install>/confluence/WEB-INF/classes/com/atlassian/confluence/setup. At Confluence startup, they are extracted and copied into the $CONFLUENCE_HOME/bundled-plugins directory, from whence they are loaded. To remove a bundled add-on (you shouldn't normally have to do this), remove the add-on from the atlassian-bundled-plugins.zip file and the bundled-plugins directory, otherwise Confluence will just put it back in place on the next startup. In versions later than 2.6, you'll have to recreate the .jar file (if the jar file is from the lib folder) or recreate the zip folder(if its in the classes folder). Bundled add-ons can be upgraded or disabled.

If you need to remove a bundled add-on, check to see if you have duplicates in the <confluence-home>/bundled-plugins or <confluence-home>/plugin-cache directory.

Usually, the problem is that an old add-on is getting loaded along with the properly bundled one, but if you need to remove a bundled add-on, check Add-on loading strategies in Confluence.