Confluence server redirecting to setup page. how do i restore access without deleting from database?

[derek_sorenson]

Recently.. our confluence server was returning an 502 Bad Gateway error from our reverse proxy. self hosted confluence server . I restarted our reverse proxy server and the confluence hosted server. After that... it started redirecting me to the setup page... asking for our license ... etc. I then logged into my atlassian account and realized our license were expired... I renewed our license and input that information on the setup page.... The setup page continued to ask questions about the database.. I input the connection details to the database... however.. now I'm stuck on this page...."/setup/setupdata-start.action"... if you go to link you will see the page. I am not the original person who setup this self-hosted confluence.

I would like to restore our confluence server back to working condition without deleting any data from the mysql database. the xml backup on the server seems to be from months ago... 

Is the data saved in the mysql database and is there a way to restore the server with the data in there?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

This sounds like your Confluence crashed (502 means "proxy is not getting a response from the server"), but also that the database connection has gone wrong.  The reversion to setup means that Confluence does not think it is connected to a (working) database.

The usual way to do this is someone edited the application properties file - it wouldn't be asking for connection settings if it had them.

Three things to look at

• The configuration file in Confluence's home directory - are the database settings correct?
• Is there data in the Confluence database?
• What do the logs say at startup?