How do I resolve this issue 'An internal error occured when trying to change your password'?

[Srinivas Palur]

I've been trying to change my  Confluence password. After clicking on the reset password link that's sent to my email inbox, I enter the new password but I see the message 'An internal error occured when trying to change your password'. Please help resolving this.

[Srinivas Palur]

Ok, I'm not sure what I can do next. Does this mean I can't use Confluence until this open ticket is resolved?

[AnnWorley]

If this is happening in Confluence Cloud (URL ends with .atlassian.net) please open a support request at https://getsupport.atlassian.com to find out why the password reset won't work.

If the instance is hosted by your company, the error means the instance is set up so you have to change your password in an external user directory, usually JIRA, Crowd or LDAP. Your company's Confluence administrator should be able to help you get logged in.

The ticket I linked is just asking to make the error message more informative. Read only external directories will not let you change your password via Confluence, even after they fix the error message.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Read the log file - it is likely to tell you something about what is wrong.

[AnnWorley]

@Srinivas PalurThe logs are on the file system:

 <confluence_install>/logs/ (anything recent in this directory)
 <confluence_home>/logs/atlassian-confluence.log
Note: The <confluence_home> directory is the path defined in the following file: <confluence_install>/confluence/WEB-INF/classes/confluence-init.properties

[AnnWorley]

The most likely case is that your account is managed by a read only user directory; Nic is correct that the log will verify this.

We have a suggestion ticket open to make the error message more informative:

When using a read only Crowd/JIRA Directory, users attempting to change their password get an unhelpful error message

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

This is one where we need to read the application logs to see what it's doing when you trigger the internal error message