How to uninstall Confluence when getting the message 'Confluence failed to shutdown. Please kill the process manually before proceeding' ?
Asked by Metalak:

I don't get it Confluence working a.t.m. on Win Server 2008 x86 / 32 Bits. After the setup it should open the website with the wizzard, but this is not shown. (I have checked if the service is running).

When uninstalling Confluence I get the message ' **Confluence failed to shutdown. Please kill the process manually before proceeding**'. You can click continue, but then the same message keeps popping up. If you click exit, the uninstaller closes.

Any ideas how I can get it working and uninstalled? (I have two installations running now, on different ports as a desperate test. Both can't start, nor uninstall.)


Answers:
author: Ryan Goodwin
body: Hi Metalak,

To shutdown Confluence you'll need to stop the windows service by opening up the windows services manager, finding the confluence (atlassian/tomcat/confluence) named service, right click and stop or click the link near the top left of the window to Shutdown.

Here is a Microsoft guide to starting/stopping services:

<http://www.sophos.com/en-us/support/knowledgebase/11299.aspx>

Confluence's documentation on installing Confluence as a service on windows:

<https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DOC/Start+Confluence+Automatically+on+Windows+as+a+Service>

Hope this helps!

comments: author: Metalak
body: Hi Ryan, thanks for the reply. But as said in the question, I already checked if the service was running. Maybe I wasn't clear enough, but I made sure it is stopped.

This looks like a serious problem in the installer/uninstaller.


author: Ryan Goodwin
body: Hi Metalak,

If the installer says the process is running, it's running. There's no problem uninstalling or installing or everyone in the community would be having issues.

Have you checked the task manager for any java or tomcat processes that are running? You should End Process on any of these that happen to be running.

If the service is set to automatically start on system startup, change it to manual and reboot the system. When the system restarts there should be no java or tomcat process running in relation to Confluence. Then follow these instructions:

<https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DOC/Uninstalling+Confluence+from+Windows>

If you're having trouble installing, you should probably log a support request so we can provide further personalized help by connecting via remote session. It's hard to troubleshoot system administration based of simple descriptions of the problem. If these steps I've given you don't work, please raise a support request at [http://support.atlassian.com](http://support.atlassian.com.).


author: Kevin Finkenbinder
body: Ryan_Goodwin

Your statement that "If the installer says the process is running, it's running. There's no problem uninstalling or installing or everyone in the community would be having issues." was pretentious. As evidenced in [@Stefan Hett](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/690418) Stefan Hett's comment, there are times that it is shut down but falsely reported because the installer does not check to see what else is on the port. Thus it allowed installation of two items using the same port, when the uninstaller gets a reply on that port, it insists the service is still running. Just because it doesn't affect everyone in the community does not mean it is not an issue, every server environment is different. Thank you [@Stefan Hett](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/690418) for providing the clue that was needed to uninstall this properly.

***This should never have been the accepted answer, when [@Metalak](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/595684) himself indicated that the problem was solved by tech support with a port change!!!***


author: Stefan Hett
body: Ran into the same problem. Also solved by Confluence support --- traced-down that port 8000 was used also by the DELL Open Manager process which glitched with the installer. Changed the port in server.xml (ConfluenceInstallFolder\\conf\\server.xml) to something else and it worked out just fine.

comments: author: Sumant
body: This one worked for me like a charm.


author: Kevin Finkenbinder
body: Thank you, even 5 years later, this was the solution I needed.


author: Nilesh Gokhale
body: Still relevant in 2022. I did the same change and the upgrade started working.

Atlassian should do something about this.


author: Mateusz Majcher
body: yeas, we have 04.2023 and this is still an issue :)


author: BrettW
body: had same error, splunk was using port 8000, had to stop that, then uninstall fine. hope this helps somebody, I like to get to the point. PS because I knew what ports were in use, I told confluence 5.3.4 to use 8001 and 8082, but I think the installer has a bug because it ignores that and does some checks on the default ports. if this helps some confluence developer or product manager to create a better product then my work is done.


author: Scott Little
body: The setup I work with has two services running that use tomcat6 - one is Confluence. I manually shut down the Confluence service, however the upgrade kept asking me to shut it down.

After I stopped the other service that used tomcat6, then clicked Continue, it started the upgrade.


author: Antonio Ortiz
body: Yeah, same here, had to manually modify the server config because the shutdown port was ignored


author: Metalak
body: this problem is resolved via confluence support by changing the ports in the xmls.


Tags: process

shutdown

uninstall