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Publish Markdown files to Confluence wiki

Contributors to software projects typically write documentation in Markdown format and host Markdown files in collaborative version control systems (VCS) such as GitHub or GitLab to track changes and facilitate the review process. However, not everyone at a company has access to VCS, and documents are often circulated in Confluence wiki instead.

Replicating documentation to Confluence by hand is tedious, and a lack of automated synchronization with the project repositories where the documents live leads to outdated documentation.

This Python package

  • parses Markdown files,
  • converts Markdown content into the Confluence Storage Format (XHTML),
  • invokes Confluence API endpoints to upload images and content.

Features

Installation

Install the core package from PyPI:

pip install markdown-to-confluence

Converting code blocks of Mermaid diagrams into Confluence image attachments requires mermaid-cli:

npm install -g @mermaid-js/mermaid-cli

Getting started

In order to get started, you will need

  • your organization domain name (e.g. example.atlassian.net),
  • base path for Confluence wiki (typically /wiki/ for managed Confluence, / for on-premise)
  • your Confluence username (e.g. [email protected]) (only if required by your deployment),
  • a Confluence API token (a string of alphanumeric characters), and
  • the space key in Confluence (e.g. SPACE) you are publishing content to.

Obtaining an API token

  1. Log in to https://id.atlassian.com/manage/api-tokens.
  2. Click Create API token.
  3. From the dialog that appears, enter a memorable and concise Label for your token and click Create.
  4. Click Copy to clipboard, then paste the token to your script, or elsewhere to save.

Setting up the environment

Confluence organization domain, base path, username, API token and space key can be specified at runtime or set as Confluence environment variables (e.g. add to your ~/.profile on Linux, or ~/.bash_profile or ~/.zshenv on MacOS):

export CONFLUENCE_DOMAIN='example.atlassian.net'
export CONFLUENCE_PATH='/wiki/'
export CONFLUENCE_USER_NAME='[email protected]'
export CONFLUENCE_API_KEY='0123456789abcdef'
export CONFLUENCE_SPACE_KEY='SPACE'

On Windows, these can be set via system properties.

Permissions

The tool requires appropriate permissions in Confluence in order to invoke endpoints.

If a Confluence username is set, the tool uses HTTP Basic authentication to pass the username and the API key to Confluence REST API endpoints. If no username is provided, the tool authenticates with HTTP Bearer, and passes the API key as the bearer token.

If you lack appropriate permissions, you will get an Unauthorized response from Confluence. The tool will emit a message that looks as follows:

2023-06-30 23:59:59,000 - ERROR - <module> [80] - 401 Client Error: Unauthorized for url: ...

Associating a Markdown file with a wiki page

Each Markdown file is associated with a Confluence wiki page with a Markdown comment:

<!-- confluence-page-id: 85668266616 -->

The above tells the tool to synchronize the Markdown file with the given Confluence page ID. This implies that the Confluence wiki page must exist such that it has an ID. The comment can be placed anywhere in the source file.

Setting the Confluence space

If you work in an environment where there are multiple Confluence spaces, and some Markdown pages may go into one space, whereas other pages may go into another, you can set the target space on a per-document basis:

<!-- confluence-space-key: SPACE -->

This overrides the default space set via command-line arguments or environment variables.

Setting generated-by prompt text for wiki pages

In order to ensure readers are not editing a generated document, the tool adds a warning message at the top of the Confluence page as an info panel. You can customize the text that appears. The text can contain markup as per the Confluence Storage Format, and is emitted directly into the info panel macro.

Provide generated-by prompt text in the Markdown file with a tag:

<!-- generated-by: Do not edit! Check out the <a href="https://example.com/project">original source</a>. -->

Alternatively, use the --generated-by GENERATED_BY option. The tag takes precedence.

Publishing a single page

md2conf has two modes of operation: single-page mode and directory mode.

In single-page mode, you specify a single Markdown file as the source, which can contain absolute links to external locations (e.g. https://example.com) but not relative links to other pages (e.g. local.md). In other words, the page must be stand-alone.

Publishing a directory

md2conf allows you to convert and publish a directory of Markdown files rather than a single Markdown file in directory mode if you pass a directory as the source. This will traverse the specified directory recursively, and synchronize each Markdown file.

First, md2conf builds an index of pages in the directory hierarchy. The index maps each Markdown file path to a Confluence page ID. Whenever a relative link is encountered in a Markdown file, the relative link is replaced with a Confluence URL to the referenced page with the help of the index. All relative links must point to Markdown files that are located in the directory hierarchy.

If a Markdown file doesn't yet pair up with a Confluence page, md2conf creates a new page and assigns a parent. Parent-child relationships are reflected in the navigation panel in Confluence. You can set a root page ID with the command-line option -r, which constitutes the topmost parent. (This could correspond to the landing page of your Confluence space. The Confluence page ID is always revealed when you edit a page.) Whenever a directory contains the file index.md or README.md, this page becomes the future parent page, and all Markdown files in this directory (and possibly nested directories) become its child pages (unless they already have a page ID). However, if an index.md or README.md file is subsequently found in one of the nested directories, it becomes the parent page of that directory, and any of its subdirectories.

Ignoring files

Skip files in a directory with rules defined in .mdignore. Each rule should occupy a single line. Rules follow the syntax of fnmatch. Specifically, ? matches any single character, and * matches zero or more characters. For example, use up-*.md to exclude Markdown files that start with up-. Lines that start with # are treated as comments.

Files that don't have the extension *.md are skipped automatically. Hidden directories (whose name starts with .) are not recursed into.

Running the tool

You execute the command-line tool md2conf to synchronize the Markdown file with Confluence:

$ python3 -m md2conf sample/index.md

Use the --help switch to get a full list of supported command-line options:

$ python3 -m md2conf --help
usage: md2conf [-h] [--version] [-d DOMAIN] [-p PATH] [-u USERNAME] [-a APIKEY] [-s SPACE]
               [-l {debug,info,warning,error,critical}] [-r ROOT_PAGE] [--generated-by GENERATED_BY] [--no-generated-by]
               [--render-mermaid] [--no-render-mermaid] [--render-mermaid-format {png,svg}] [--heading-anchors]
               [--ignore-invalid-url] [--local] [--headers [KEY=VALUE ...]] [--webui-links]
               mdpath

positional arguments:
  mdpath                Path to Markdown file or directory to convert and publish.

options:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  --version             show program's version number and exit
  -d DOMAIN, --domain DOMAIN
                        Confluence organization domain.
  -p PATH, --path PATH  Base path for Confluence (default: '/wiki/').
  -u USERNAME, --username USERNAME
                        Confluence user name.
  -a APIKEY, --apikey APIKEY
                        Confluence API key. Refer to documentation how to obtain one.
  -s SPACE, --space SPACE
                        Confluence space key for pages to be published. If omitted, will default to user space.
  -l {debug,info,warning,error,critical}, --loglevel {debug,info,warning,error,critical}
                        Use this option to set the log verbosity.
  -r ROOT_PAGE          Root Confluence page to create new pages. If omitted, will raise exception when creating new pages.
  --generated-by GENERATED_BY
                        Add prompt to pages (default: 'This page has been generated with a tool.').
  --no-generated-by     Do not add 'generated by a tool' prompt to pages.
  --render-mermaid      Render Mermaid diagrams as image files and add as attachments.
  --no-render-mermaid   Inline Mermaid diagram in Confluence page.
  --render-mermaid-format {png,svg}
                        Format for rendering Mermaid diagrams (default: 'png').
  --heading-anchors     Place an anchor at each section heading with GitHub-style same-page identifiers.
  --ignore-invalid-url  Emit a warning but otherwise ignore relative URLs that point to ill-specified locations.
  --local               Write XHTML-based Confluence Storage Format files locally without invoking Confluence API.
  --headers [KEY=VALUE ...]
                        Apply custom headers to all Confluence API requests.
  --webui-links         Enable Confluence Web UI links. (Typically required for on-prem versions of Confluence.)

Using the Docker container

You can run the Docker container via docker run or via Dockerfile. Either can accept the environment variables or arguments similar to the Python options. The final argument ./ corresponds to mdpath in the command-line utility.

With docker run, you can pass Confluence domain, user, API and space key directly to docker run:

docker run --rm --name md2conf -v $(pwd):/data leventehunyadi/md2conf:latest -d example.atlassian.net -u [email protected] -a 0123456789abcdef -s SPACE ./

Alternatively, you can use a separate file .env to pass these parameters as environment variables:

docker run --rm --env-file .env --name md2conf -v $(pwd):/data leventehunyadi/md2conf:latest ./

In each case, -v $(pwd):/data maps the current directory to Docker container's WORKDIR such md2conf can scan files and directories in the local file system.

Note that the entry point for the Docker container's base image is ENTRYPOINT ["python3", "-m", "md2conf"].

With the Dockerfile approach, you can extend the base image:

FROM leventehunyadi/md2conf:latest

ENV CONFLUENCE_DOMAIN='example.atlassian.net'
ENV CONFLUENCE_PATH='/wiki/'
ENV CONFLUENCE_USER_NAME='[email protected]'
ENV CONFLUENCE_API_KEY='0123456789abcdef'
ENV CONFLUENCE_SPACE_KEY='SPACE'

CMD ["./"]

Alternatively,

FROM leventehunyadi/md2conf:latest

CMD ["-d", "example.atlassian.net", "-u", "[email protected]", "-a", "0123456789abcdef", "-s", "SPACE", "./"]