Unable to edit pages or enable Collaborative Editing on Confluence due to disabled system plugins

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Platform notice: Server and Data Center only. This article only applies to Atlassian products on the Server and Data Center platforms.

Support for Server* products ended on February 15th 2024. If you are running a Server product, you can visit the Atlassian Server end of support announcement to review your migration options.

*Except Fisheye and Crucible

Problem

When attempting to enable Collaborative Editing in Confluence, its management page under General Configuration does not load in the browser or cannot be found. If this feature was enabled previously, it is not possible to edit or create pages after restarting or upgrading the application.

Symptoms

There is a loading icon in place of the Collaborative Editing settings page: <base-url>/admin/confluence-collaborative-editor-plugin/configure.action

There may be several browser-based pop-up messages stating:

Something went wrong.

Please try again.

Alternatively, you may not even see the Collaborative Editing page under General Configuration.

Diagnosis

The atlassian-confluence.log shows the following error message if CE was already enabled:

WARN [https-jsse-nio2-8443-exec-21] [atlassian.troubleshooting.confluence.ConfluenceApplicationInfo] addSynchronyConfiguration Not able to locate the service for getting the Synchrony configuration. The Collaborative Editor Plugin may have been disabled.

If you don't have access to the logs and you are trying to enable CE:

Click here to expand...

Generate a HAR file or view the developer tools network tab in your browser.

Look for a 404 Not Found error for synchrony-status, on the Request URL: <base-url>/rest/synchrony-interop/synchrony-status

Example: 

Confirm the issue by attempting to reach these URLs in your browser:

  • <base-url>/rest/synchrony-interop/synchrony-status
  • <base-url>/rest/synchrony-interop/status

Or, via curl on the Confluence server:

  • curl -v -u username:password <base-url>/rest/synchrony-interop/synchrony-status
  • curl -v -u username:password <base-url>/rest/synchrony-interop/status

Expected Results

  • <base-url>/rest/synchrony-interop/status 
    {"synchronyEnabled":true,"sharedDraftsEnabled":true}

    or 

    {"synchronyEnabled":false,"sharedDraftsEnabled":false}
  • <base-url>/rest/synchrony-interop/synchrony-status 
    {"status":"running"}

    or 

    {"status":"stopped"}

    Actual Results

    These URLs return a 404 Page Not Found error both in the browser and when testing via curl from the Confluence server.

    However, the following test should return an OK from Synchrony, indicating the reverse proxy & other infrastructure is properly routing traffic to Synchrony:

    • <base-url>/synchrony/heartbeat
    • curl <base-url>/synchrony/heartbeat

    Additionally, the Synchrony Interop Bootstrap plugin is disabled under General Configuration > Add-ons > All

Resolution

Enable the Synchrony Interop Bootstrap plugin under General Configuration > Add-ons > All. If this plugin is disabled, we see the error Something went wrong messages on the CE management page.

After enabling it, make sure that the Collaborative Editing Plugin is also enabled. If this plugin is disabled, we cannot access the CE management page at all.

Notes

If you see any error on the UI while attempting to enable those plugins:

Click here to expand...

Example:

This add-on failed to enable. Refer to logs for more information.

Checking the logs, we may see this:

2018-06-11 11:05:52,146 ERROR [ThreadPoolAsyncTaskExecutor::Thread 23] [plugin.osgi.factory.OsgiPlugin] onPluginContainerFailed Unable to start the plugin container for plugin 'com.atlassian.confluence.plugins.synchrony-interop'
 -- referer: http://localhost:8090/confluence/plugins/servlet/upm/manage/system | url: /confluence/rest/plugins/1.0/com.atlassian.confluence.plugins.synchrony-interop-key | traceId: 4533637b00745964 | userName: admin
org.springframework.beans.factory.BeanDefinitionStoreException: Unexpected exception parsing XML document from URL [bundle://246.0:0/META-INF/spring/spring-scanner.xml]; nested exception is java.lang.NullPointerException

Or this:

2018-05-29 12:11:24,173 ERROR [ThreadPoolAsyncTaskExecutor::Thread 51] [internal.dependencies.startup.DependencyWaiterApplicationContextExecutor] fail Unable to create application context for [com.atlassian.confluence.plugins.synchrony-interop], unsatisfied dependencies: none
 -- referer: http://localhost:8090/plugins/servlet/upm/manage/system | url: /rest/plugins/1.0/com.atlassian.confluence.plugins.synchrony-interop-key | traceId: 3a82f8fb84042166 | userName: admin
org.springframework.beans.factory.BeanDefinitionStoreException: Unexpected exception parsing XML document from URL [bundle://255.0:0/META-INF/spring/spring-scanner.xml]; nested exception is java.lang.IllegalStateException: Cannot execute atlassian-spring-scanner-runtime: plugin has an extra copy of atlassian-spring-scanner-annotation classes, perhaps embedded inside the target plugin 'com.atlassian.confluence.plugins.synchrony-interop'; embedding scanner-annotations is not supported since scanner version 2.0. Use 'mvn dependency:tree' and ensure the atlassian-spring-scanner-annotation dependency in your plugin has <scope>provided</scope>, not 'runtime' or 'compile', and you have NO dependency on atlassian-spring-scanner-runtime.

The messages above can be caused by corrupted plugin caches or other system plugins being disabled, resulting in a dependency miss while enabling the Interop add-on. To workaround this problem, proceed as follows:

  • Stop Confluence
  • Run the following query on its database to ensure all system plugins are enabled:
update BANDANA 
set BANDANAVALUE='<map/>'
where BANDANAKEY='plugin.manager.state.Map';

If you still have problems, attempt to start Confluence in Safe Mode. Check the Temporarily disabling add-ons on start-up (Confluence 6.1 and later) section of this document on how to achieve that.

Cause

When the browser tries to load the Collaborative Editing settings page (<base-url>/admin/confluence-collaborative-editor-plugin/configure.action), it makes a call to <base-url>/rest/synchrony-interop/synchrony-status to check the current status of Collaborative Editing, which is handled by the Synchrony Interop Bootstrap plugin. 

If the Synchrony Interop Bootstrap plugin is disabled, it causes the browser to receive an unexpected response, and thus the page doesn't render as expected. Nothing appears in the atlassian-confluence.log because this is a client-side operation performed by the browser for this particular plugin.

This can occur when the Collaborative Editing Plugin is disabled, as it automatically disables the Synchrony Interop Bootstrap Plugin as well. When later re-enabling the Collaborative Editing Plugin, it does not enable Synchrony Interop Bootstrap Plugin automatically. This issue with the plugin not being re-enabled automatically is a bug, tracked here: CONFSERVER-52516 - Synchrony doesn't work after disabling and enabling the Collab. Editing add-on

Last modified on Jan 29, 2025

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