Setting Up PostgreSQL for Confluence

On recent Redhat Fedora 5 distributions, MySQL 5.0+ is included. However, as of March 2007, Confluence does not support MySQL 5.0. They suggest using MySQL 4.1+. However MySQL 4.1 can not easily be installed at the same time as MySQL 5.0. So, if you have already installed MySQL 5.0 on your system, it may be easier to use PostgreSQL. Confluence is up to date for the latest versions of PostgreSQL (Version 8+ at time of writing). Version 8+ comes with recent distributions of Fedora 5, such as are included with books such as "Red Hat Fedora 5 Unleashed".

Here are the steps to set it up:

• Login as root
• At the command prompt: su postgres
• Enter psql client, and run these commands:
  • CREATE USER confluence CREATEDB PASSWORD 'yoursecurepassword';
  • CREATE DATABASE confluence;
• You should also change the postgres user password to something memorable.
  Do this with the ALTER USER command:
  • ALTER USER postgres PASSWORD 'yoursecurepassword';

After installing Confluence, but before running startup, there is an extra step not mentioned at http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DOC/Installing+Confluence+Standalone

You must add the JDBC driver for your database. If you do not, you will get an error like this when you get to that step in the setup:

• "The specified database driver was not found. If you are running Confluence Standalone, please ensure that you have copied your database's JDBC driver into the common/lib directory. Otherwise, consult your application server documentation for instructions on how to add the drivers to your server classpath... You will need to restart your server after installing the drivers. (Setup will resume at the beginning of the database setup step)."
  • Typo in Confluence: documention

The details for this are covered here:

• http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DOC/Database+Configuration
• http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DOC/Database+Setup+For+Any+External+Database
• However, they do not cover where to get PostgreSQL jdbc driver from: http://jdbc.postgresql.org/

The next error you might see is:

• Configuring the database failed. Couldn't create the database schema.
• org.postgresql.util.PSQLException: FATAL: Ident authentication failed for user "confluence"

This requires more setup for PostgreSQL.

PostgreSQL logs may be at: /var/lib/pgsql/data/pg_log

They may reveal something like:

• LOG: could not connect to Ident server at address "127.0.0.1", port 113: Connection refused
• FATAL: Ident authentication failed for user "confluence"

Fedora 5 does not seem to include an ident service. The PostgreSQL reminds that ident is not a good way to guarantee security anyway. Use password instead.

Edit /var/log/pgsql/data/ph_hba.conf to select password method, instead of ident method. (Another possible location: /var/lib/pgsql/data/pg_hba.conf)

If PostgreSQL already running, do

• kill -s SIGHUP [pid of postmaster process]
• You can use

  ps fauxww|grep postmaster

  to find the PID of the postmaster process.

If you properly created the database, you won't see this error:

• Configuring the database failed. Couldn't create the database schema.
• org.postgresql.util.PSQLException: FATAL: database "confluence" does not exist