The License You Entered Was Not Valid

Platform Notice: Data Center Only - This article only applies to Atlassian products 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

Symptoms

During the setup wizard, in the "Enter License" step, the following error is displayed:

(Auto-migrated image: description temporarily unavailable)

Possible causes

Possible cause #1

There are two lines associated with the Home directory in the <confluence-install>/confluence/WEB-INF/classes/confluence-init.properties file:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 # This file allows you to set the directory for Confluence to store its configuration files. # ########################### # Note for Windows Users # ########################### # # Each backslash in your path must be written as a forward slash. # - For example: # c:\confluence\data # # should be written as: # # c:/confluence/data ########################### # Note for Unix Users # ########################### # - For example: confluence.home=/var/confluence # # NOTE: If the path of your confluence.home directory contains symlinks, # please set confluence.home to the absolute path, otherwise problems may occur. # - For example: # confluence.home=/data/confluence/ (where /data is a symlink to -> /var/data/) # should be written as: # confluence.home=/var/data/confluence/ ########################### # Configuration Directory # ########################### # specify your directory below (don't forget to remove the '#' in front) confluence.home=C:/confluence_folder/home_of_folder

If both lines are uncommented, Confluence will throw the license error.

Possible cause #2

If you have invalid permissions on your <CONFLUENCE-HOME> directory or on the <CONFLUENCE-HOME>/confluence.cfg.xml file in particular the same error may appear.

Possible cause #3

You are using a version 2 licence with a version of Confluence prior to 2.1.

Resolution

For cause #1

Your

confluence-init.properties

should have only one

confluence.home

entry, meaning that every other line should be commented (with the # character).

For cause #2

Fix the permissions on the <CONFLUENCE-HOME> directory and the confluence.cfg.xml file so that the user running Confluence will have read/write permissions.

For cause #3

Contact support to obtain a version 1 licence.

Please note that Version 1 license is meant for upgrade purposes only. Once the upgrade process is complete, kindly log in to your My Atlassian Account to apply your existing license key.

Updated on April 15, 2025

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