What's the best way to manage plugins in Confluence ?

[Jason Pepper]

Whilst I really like the concept of an open marketplace for plugins providing functionality, once you have decided upon a set of plugins for a production implementation you really don't want to change them.

In a properly managed production environment it would be prudent to have a failover server which should be identical in configuration (incl plugins) so that the failover is as simple as possible.

Furthermore, in a properly managed environment you would also have test and development servers to enable the development of content, procedures and the like.

So, my question is this..

Does there exist a mechanism or strategy for the managing of plugins to enable the swift building of a dev/test server so that it is identical in configuration without having to MANUALLY install all the plugins one by one ?

The reason I ask is that I am faced with this task regularly when creating/destroying test VM's and it is really beginning to annoy me !

Thanks for any input ;-)

[Jobin Kuruvilla [Adaptavist] · Accepted solution]

There is no easy way! You will have to follow the below documentation:

https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DOC/Migrating+Confluence+Between+Servers

If you read between the lines, there are 4 major steps:

1. Get a backup of Production DB

2. Get a zip/tar of Production JIRA installation and Home directories and move them to Test server

3. Point the Test JIRA to the DB in stpe 1 before you start it up

4. Do a reindexing

[Jason Pepper]

Thanks for your answer, but I already figured that out for myself.

Strikes me that this kind of thing shows the immaturity of Confluence and Atlassian themselves at the concept of grown-up enterprise mission critical systems management.

Ideally I'd want to be able to take a nightly export and apply it every day to a cold-failover machine using a set of automated scripts so that automated failover could occur without the need to employ a cluster and only incur the cost of a 24 hour maximum data loss.

Maybe it'll come soon - I hope so.

[Jobin Kuruvilla [Adaptavist]]

Maybe it'll come soon - I hope so.

Me too! They are a company that concentrate more on product features, which is a good thing for users.

However, they are making lot of admin improvements recently - an upgrade tool is just one of them. More will follow I think.