Configuring a MySQL Datasource in Apache Tomcat

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This page tells you how to set up a MySQL datasource connection for Confluence.

Step 1. Shut down Confluence

  1. Run bin/ or bin/stop-confluence.bat to bring down Confluence while you are making these changes.

Step 2. Install the MySQL database driver

  1. Download the MySQL JDBC driver. See Database JDBC Drivers for links.
  2. Unpack the archive file you have downloaded, and find the JAR file called something like  mysql-connector-java-x.x.x-bin.jar, where x.x.x is a version number.

Step 3. Configure Tomcat

  1. Edit the conf/server.xml file in your Confluence installation directory.
  2. Find the following lines:


    <!-- If you're using Confluence 5.7 or below; change maxTotal to maxActive -->
             validationQuery="Select 1" />


    • Replace yourusername and yourpassword with the actual credentials for your database.
    • In the url parameter, replace 'confluence' with the name of the database your Confluence data will be stored in.
  • If switching from a direct JDBC connection to a datasource connection, you can find the above details in your <CONFLUENCE_HOME>/confluence.cfg.xml file.
  • The configuration properties for Tomcat's standard datasource resource factory (org.apache.tomcat.dbcp.dbcp.BasicDataSourceFactory) are as follows:
    • driverClassName – Fully qualified Java class name of the JDBC driver to be used.
    • maxTotal – The maximum number of database connections in the pool at the same time. 
    • maxIdle – The maximum number of connections that can sit idle in this pool at the same time.
    • password – Database password to be passed to your JDBC driver.
    • url – Connection URL to be passed to your JDBC driver. (For backwards compatibility, the property driverName is also recognized.)
    • user – Database username to be passed to your JDBC driver.
    • validationQuery – SQL query that can be used by the pool to validate connections before they are returned to the application. If specified, this query must be an SQL SELECT statement that returns at least one row.
  • Why is the validationQuery element needed? When a database server reboots, or there is a network failure, all the connections in the connection pool are broken and this normally requires an application server reboot. However, the Commons DBCP (Database Connection Pool) which is used by the Tomcat application server can validate connections before issuing them by running a simple SQL query, and if a broken connection is detected, a new one is created to replace it. To do this, you will need to set the validationQuery option on the database connection pool.

Step 4. Configure the Confluence web application

  1. Edit the confluence/WEB-INF/web.xml file in your Confluence installation directory.

        <description>Connection Pool</description>


  1. Edit the <CONFLUENCE_HOME>/confluence.cfg.xml file.
  3. Insert the following at the start of the <properties> section.

    <property name="hibernate.dialect"><![CDATA[com.atlassian.hibernate.dialect.MySQLDialect]]></property>

Step 5. Restart Confluence


Last modified on Jul 9, 2017

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