How do you change the main web UI address Confluence?

[Davey Jones]

I am trying to create a clone of my production Confluence server for patch testing. My issue is I cannot figure out how to change the web address for the page from the production confluence.mydomain to dev.confluece.mydomain for the new development server.

[Dave Theodore [Coyote Creek Consulting]]

Atlassian has a doc for that! You will need to be a Confluence system-administrator in order  to make this change.

[Davey Jones]

Dave I need to do this in the backend and changing the server.xml doesn't seem to have done the trick.

[Dave Theodore [Coyote Creek Consulting]]

What do you mean by "the backend?"

Unless you have made changes to server.xml, you don't need to make any changes to it.  If you have the application sitting behind a proxy server or something similar and added the proxy stuff to server.xml, you will need to change the "proxyName" value to the new hostname. The doc I linked and this change should be all that is needed, unless you are doing something unusual.

[Davey Jones]

I currently only have access to the Linux command line to solve this issue since there is already a server running on the confluence.mydomain address which the clone is still configured to use. So they conflict with each other when both are on the network.

[Dave Theodore [Coyote Creek Consulting]]

Sorry, I'm a bit lost on what you're doing. Here's how I would go about setting up a dev instance, though.

1. Stand up new dev server, Java and database.
2. Open TCP:8090 on the host-based firewall
3. Take an ascii dump of the database and load it in to the dev db
4. rsync the home directory for Confluence to the dev server and put in to the dev home directory.
5. Change "confluence.cfg.xml" to point to the dev database in the home directory
6. Set up Confluence from the tar.gz distribution downloaded from Atlassian.
7. Modify the "confluence-init.properties" file to point to the new dev home directory
8. Start Confluence and `tail -f` the log file to make sure it starts happily.
9. Point my browser to http://<dev.server.ip.address>:8090
10. Log in to the Confluence UI and change the Server Base URL (per the above linked doc)
11. Make any other configuration changes needed to get it running on the TCP port you need, set up DNS, etc.

I hope that helps.