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Confluence "Database not empty" message after migrating to Docker container

Connor May 6, 2025

Hello everyone, we are working on a proof of concept containerizing Confluence using the Atlassian Docker image in AWS ECS. We are working with an existing RDS instance cloned from our Test environment, so it has data in it.

We have the Task definition setup to connect to the database, and those parameters get passed to the confluence.cfg.xml file as expected. However, when the container starts, it brings us to a page that asks us whether we want a single-instance deployment or a clustered deployment. We're only doing single-instance for now, and we will move on to clustered when we've gotten it working with a single instance. Our goal is to have the provisioning automated end-to-end.

When we select single-instance, we get an error message saying the database isn't empty. That's expected, because we're just trying to connect this containerized application server to an existing database.

I noticed that we have the following parameters in confluence.cfg.xml:

<setupStep>setupcluster-start</setupStep>

  <setupType>cluster</setupType>

I think that this is the culprit, but I'm not sure why it's defaulting to these values instead of the following as we see in our normal Test instance:

<setupStep>complete</setupStep>
<setupType>custom</setupType>

Does anyone have an idea of what I'm missing here? I don't see how I can set parameters to specify that the setup is already complete and it's not a clustered deployment in the documentation. Thank you in advance!

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Connor May 21, 2025

We were able to solve this issue using a couple of undocumented settings in our Task Definition which we found by reviewing the j2 template.

What we did is we set the following parameters:

atl_setup_type: custom

atl_setup_step: complete

 

0 votes
Connor May 6, 2025

Apologies in advance, it looks like I submitted this with the "Cloud" deployment type by mistake... This is on-prem

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DEPLOYMENT TYPE
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