Running Confluence on GlassFish v3

Even though Atlassian considers GlassFish to be an unsupported servlet container for Confluence, it is quite easy to use Confluence with GlassFish v2.1. In fact that's the container that I've been using for a long time during my Confluence and Confluence plugin development.

I've been monitoring progress of GlassFish v3 development for several months and noticed that at some point Confluence 2.x and 3.0.x stopped working due to conflicts between different versions of Apache Felix used by both GFv3 and Confluence.

Fortunately Confluence 3.1 now contains Felix v2.x (an upgrade from 1.x), which solves the previously mentioned issues. Excited about the change, I tried to deploy Confluence 3.1 to GFv3 (final) and observed that there are a few more issues that one needs to deal with. I filed these two bugs and one RFE against Confluence and provided patches that anyone can use to get Confluence to run with GFv3:

• SER-144 - Illegal cyclic dependency between LoginFilter and SecurityFilter
• CONF-18093 - DefaultUserProfileService tries to modify an unmodifiable collection (PATCH)
• CONF-18094 - Bundle sun-web.xml with classloader settings required for GlassFish (PATCH)

Once the patches are applied to the Confluence source code, build a war file in the usual way, deploy it to GFv3 and you should be good to go. (There is a harmless exception thrown when Confluence starts, more info, just ignore it)

Oh, and be sure to vote for CONF-6603 to get Atlassian to officially support GlassFish.