How to change the ownership of confluence?

[Dabin Daniel Sundaram]

Confluence is running with the id of root. I want it to run with the tools id. Please let me know the exact step and path. Kindly let me know the commands to change it to tools id.

[Kishan Sharma]

Hi @Dabin Daniel Sundaram 

If the confluence is already running as root, you might want to shut it down first with root user.

Then as root user run -

chown -R tools <confluence-install-directory>

This will change to ownership of all files under install-directory to tools

Then switch to tools user and start confluence. 

If you are not aware of your install directory path, try to run the following command in your terminal and check the path there

ps aux | grep confluence

[Dabin Daniel Sundaram]

Hi @Kishan Sharma

Do the shut down is mandatory? Is it possible to change without shutting down the application?

[Kishan Sharma]

Hi @Dabin Daniel Sundaram 

You cannot change owner of a running process in Linux, so, yes shutdown is mandatory as you want to run the process with tools user and there's an existing process running as root which needs to be killed/stopped first. 

[Dabin Daniel Sundaram]

Hi @Kishan Sharma 

We can able to change the directories/folders permissions from root to tools without shutting down the application. Could you please let me know why the shutdown is necessary for doing the same thing with Confluence.

[Kishan Sharma]

Hi @Dabin Daniel Sundaram 

Yes, file ownership change will work irrespective of whether confluence is running or not.

As I said earlier, there's no way of changing ownership of already running process in Linux, you will need to kill it or stop it and then restart the process as a new user. If its a live environment, you can try restarting it during non-business hours.

[Radek Dostál]

I just want to add, you're running the application under root, if you are worried about a 5 minute downtime, your priorities are wrong.