How to Rebuild the Content Indexes From Scratch
Platform Notice: Data Center Only - This article only applies to Atlassian apps on the Data Center platform.
Note that this KB was created for the Data Center version of the product. Data Center KBs for non-Data-Center-specific features may also work for Server versions of the product, however they have not been tested. 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
Summary
The Confluence index may become out of date or corrupted due to a variety of reasons (see Confluence Indexing Troubleshooting Guide). When this occurs, some pages may not show up in search results as expected. The purpose of this KB is to detail the steps on how to rebuild the index from scratch across the entire Confluence Data Center cluster while minimizing downtime.
Rebuilding the index can sometimes take a while as it is re-indexing all the content in your site. If your Confluence instance is configured with Lucene (default), be aware that while a node is rebuilding the index, users will be unable to searchConfluence on that node. You may wish to temporarily remove the node from the rotation in your load balancer so that users will not access it. Additionally, please consider performing your re-index after hours.
This is not an issue on an instance configured with OpenSearch: Confluence will rebuild the index with a blue-green approach. This means the indexing process will be run on a new index, so that the search functionality will remain unaffected on the existing index.
Solution
Your deployment | Go to |
|---|---|
Confluence Server (any version, standalone/unclustered) | How to Rebuild the Content Indexes From Scratch on Unclustered Confluence |
Confluence Data Center 7.7 or later | Content Index Administration (no downtime, done via the UI) |
Confluence Data Center 5.9 to 7.6, no downtime needed | |
Confluence Data Center 5.9 to 7.6, downtime is acceptable |
If your instance is configured with OpenSearch (rather than the default Lucene), reindexing uses a blue-green approach and search remains available throughout — the node-rotation guidance in the linked sub-articles is primarily relevant to Lucene-configured instances.
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