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is tedious, and a lack of automated synchronization with the project repositories where the documents live leads to outdated documentation.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

• Sections and subsections
• Text with bold, italic, monospace, underline and strikethrough
• Link to external locations
• Ordered and unordered lists
• Code blocks (e.g. Python, JSON, XML)
• Image references (uploaded as Confluence page attachments)
• Table of Contents

Getting started

In order to get started, you will need

• your organization domain name (e.g. instructure.atlassian.net),
• your Confluence username (e.g. [email protected]),
• a Confluence API token (a string of alphanumeric characters), and
• the space key in Confluence (e.g. DAP) 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 URL, 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='instructure.atlassian.net'
export CONFLUENCE_USER_NAME='[email protected]'
export CONFLUENCE_API_KEY='0123456789abcdef'
export CONFLUENCE_SPACE_KEY='DAP'

On Windows, these can be set via system properties.

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

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.

Provide generated-by prompt text in Markdown file

Provide generated-by prompt text in Markdown file via the following optional tag:

<!-- generated-by: Do not edit! Origin can be found <a href="https://git.example.com/project">here</a>. -->

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

Running the tool

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

python3 -m md2conf example.md