What causes a '503' Error in Conflunce?

Ashley Terry

Running Ubuntu 16.04.6 with Confluence and Crowd installed as a service.

 

When looking through logs and service status I constantly get this 'PID File found but PID doesn't match any running processes. Stopping Tomcat Aborted' If I go in and kill the service manually and remove the PID from the catalina.pid file, confluence will start but crash about 15 min later with the same issues. I can post whatever I need to get this resolved. 

Brant Schroeder

Looks as though running as root is causing your errors above, you will need to run Confluence as a non-root user. There are details when setting up Confluence which allows you to set the Confluence user and password. Here are further details in regards to this:

Running Confluence as a service means that Confluence will automatically start up when Linux is started.

If you choose to run Confluence as a service:

• You must use sudo to run the installer to be able to install Confluence as a service.
• The installer will create a dedicated user account, confluence, that will run the service.

If you choose not to run Confluence as a service:

• You will start and stop Confluence by running the start-confluence.sh file in your Confluence installation directory.
• Confluence will be run as the user account that was used to install Confluence, or you can choose to run as a dedicated user.
• Confluence will need to be restarted manually if your server is restarted.

Reference documentation: Installing Confluence on Linux

If you do not know the password to the Confluence user you will need to reset it. Once reset you may use that password to run Confluence as a service.