Error during upgrade: Unable to dtermine location of the home directory ...

Question

When starting the installer for Confluence 5.13 and selecting "Upgrade an existing confluence installation" after setting the directory and pressing next I receive:

Unable to determine location of the home direcotry. 'confluence.home' was not found inside confluence-init.properties.

But it is inside ...

Thanks for your support

unknown · Answer

Hey Dieter,

Probably this is obsolete for you, but if anyone faces this error: It was due to the fact that the installer probably looks for registry settings which it can't find. Check if your current JIRA instance is installed by Atlassian's installer. I did have an instance which I created by copying the files only, and I couldn't upgrade. The only solution was:

* delete my instance
* install the original JIRA version
* connect it to the database
* run the new version installer

AndrewA · Answer

Hello Dieter,

Is that error given in the UI or in the logs?  Eiteher way, is there a larger log snipprt from <confluence Home>/logs/atlassian-conflence.logs that you can show us?  If I had to guess I would imagine we are hitting some kind of file permission error.  In which case, are we running the installer as the same user which runs Confluence?  If not, I would advise trying this.

Cheers,
Andrew