Symptoms

When trying to reach Confluence via a web browser, the user encounters a blank/white screen. There are no errors on screen.

Both the Tomcat and the Confluence application logs show that Confluence is running fine.

Cause

This is commonly due to context path configurations in <confluence_install>/conf/server.xml. For example, if the context path is set to "/confluence", then accessing the URL without the additional "/confluence" path will result in a blank screen.

Resolution 1

• Go to your <confluence_install> directory and open /conf/server.xml in a text editor.
• Locate the Context element, which looks something like the below:

   

  <Context path="/wiki" docBase="../confluence" debug="0" reloadable="false" useHttpOnly="true">

  
  In the above example, the context path is set to "/wiki". Therefore, in your browser, you should access Confluence at http://servername:port/wiki instead of simply http://servername:port. The latter will result in a blank screen.

More information on Tomcat's Context element can be found here:

• Tomcat 6: http://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-6.0-doc/config/context.html
• Tomcat 7: http://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-7.0-doc/config/context.html

Resolution 2

Verify that any proxy is directing traffic to the correct port as designated in the server.xml file referenced above. For Apache proxies this document may be of help: Using Apache with mod_proxy  

Resolution 3

Verify that the name="" property in your /conf/server.xml file is pointing to the same domain as the base URL:

<Host name="server_name" debug="0" appBase="webapps" unpackWARs="true" autoDeploy="false">