Migrating Content From One Confluence Instance to Another

Introduction

From time to time, as a Confluence administrator, you'll be called upon to migrate a space to a new Confluence instance. This guide provides some tried and true steps to generate a list of spaces in Confluence, figure out how active a space is (so you can decide if it should be archived, migrated, or simply removed), how to find a space owner, add a warning message to a space, set a space to "read-only" mode, and delete a space.

Required skills

You should be comfortable and/or knowledgable with the following:

• HTML
• Managing Confluence space themes
• Basic Confluence administration
• Exporting and importing Confluence spaces

Migrating Confluence content

1. Generate a list of all the spaces in your old Confluence (instance). This list will be used as a checklist for tracking all the spaces that have been migrated to the new instance.
   1. To get a list of spaces, go to Spaces > Space Directory. This page will show you a list of all the spaces in your instance.
2. Start reviewing the spaces for level of activity. I believe it is safe to say that if a space hasn't had any visitors in 6+ months, then it should be marked as archived and prioritized for either removal or migration.
   1. To see the level of activity, go into the space and then Space Tools > Activity. In the Activity page, set the Period for months and review the previous six months of activity by clicking on the previous button for the month section.
   2. To archive a space, go to the space in Confluence and then Space Tools > Overview. In the Overview page, click on Edit space details button. From there, change the Status to Archived and click on the Save button.
3. Identify and speak with space owner(s) and get their permission to archive and/or migrate a space. Also ask them if the space should have a higher or lower priority for migration.
   1. To see who the space owner is, open the space and go to Space Tools > Permissions. Under Individual Users, you should typically see someone who has all permissions to the space. Another way to see who created the space is to go to the space's home page. This home page will have information about who created this page (which should be the person who created the space (i.e. the owner of the space) unless of course the Confluence administrator is responsible with the task of creating spaces.
4. Work with space owner(s) on active spaces so you don't interrupt their work and set a date for migration.
5. Add a migration warning to the space that it will be migrated on a designated date.
   1. To add a warning label to a space and the target space is using the Documentation Theme, follow these steps:
      1. Navigate to the space's Themes page (space > Space Admin > Themes).
      2. In the Messages section under Header, add the following code:
         {html}
<div style="background-color: red; color: white; padding: 5px;">This space will be migrated on <span style="color: yellow"><designated_migration_date></span></div>
{html}
      3. This will add a message on top of every page in the space and the unstylish colors will definitely grab the attention of everyone viewing the page.
      4. Note: it's a good idea to give everyone at least a two weeks notice about the migration.
6. For unvisited spaces or spaces about to be migrated, put the space into "read-only" mode.
   1. To make a space "read-only", go to Space Tools > Permissions.
   2. In the Permissions page, you should see a list of space admins and groups. It would be best to leave the permission scheme alone for the space admins but if you have a group where all users fall under, change it so it is only set to All View to checked and everything else is unchecked.
7. Export spaces on designated dates. Start with higher priority spaces and work your way down to the low priority spaces. See Export and Import a Confluence Space for instructions on how to export a space.
8. Import the exported space into the new instance. See Export and Import a Confluence Space for details on how to import a space.
9. Go into the newly imported space and confirm that everything is in proper order (content and attachments are fine, macros are working as expected, permissions are good, and so on). Note: this step may take a bit of time. I recommend that you get help from the original space owner(s) to confirm that the migration went well.
10. Change migration notice to migrated and marked for removal. Update warning of the exported space in the old instance that it has been migrated (with a link to the new space) and add a removal date.
    1. To add a removal warning, repeat the sub-steps listed in step 5.
       1. Navigate to the space's Themes page (space > Space Admin > Themes).
       2. In the Messages section under Header, add the following code:
          {html}
<div style="background-color: red; color: white; padding: 5px;">This space has been migrated to <a style="color: white; text-decoration: underline;" href="url_of_new_confluence_instance/display/<spacekey>">url_of_new_confluence_instance/display/<spacekey></a> and will be removed from this wiki on <designated_removal_date></div>
{html}
          
       3. This will add a message on top of every page in the space and the unstylish colors will definitely grab the attention of everyone viewing the page.
       4. Note: it's a good idea to give everyone at least a two weeks notice about the removal.
11. On the designated removal date, delete the space old space in the old instance of Confluence. While this is a very dangerous step, keep in mind that you have the exported zip file and the newly created space in the new instance. If anything goes wrong, you can always re-import the space back into the original Confluence instance.
• To delete a space, go to Space Tools > Overview. Click the Delete Space button. You may be prompted to enter your credentials so be ready to enter that information. Click the Ok button to start the deletion process. Depending on how big the space is, this could take a few seconds or several minutes. Check with the Time Remaining counter (I find it's mostly accurate 90% of the time but that will vary from server to server based on your server's configuration).

Tip: You may want to include a message at the top of the newly imported space in the new instance where one can find the old space in the old instance. Just use the sub-steps mentioned in either step 5 or 10 and add the necessary info to point back to the old space.

Automating Content Extraction From Confluence Using Exporter Plugins and Bash

Intro

As a technical writer, one of the many tasks I must work with on a regular basis is pulling content from multiple sources and compiling them into a source file for publication. Early on, the process I used was a very hands on process of manually generating a compressed file from Confluence and other sources, manipulate the contents of the extracted content, bundle everything up, and publish the refined package.

This tutorial's goal is to get novice users familiar with one method of automating content extraction by using a simple Bash script file that pulls content from Confluence using an exporter scheme URL.

The process contains two components: an export scheme URL and a Bash script. I have written two tutorials on how to extract content using two of Scroll's exporter plugins. Refer to Part 2 and/or Part 3 in the Export Content from Confluence series for details on how to generate the export URL using either Scroll's EclipseHelp or HTML Exporter plugins. You will need to complete at least one of these tutorials in order to complete this tutorial as you will need the export scheme URL. The Bash script we will create handles the manual part of extracting content from Confluence.

This tutorial is written for Mac users. The Bash features used in this document has not been tested on Linux but you know your way around wget, this tutorial should work just fine.

Prerequisites

Confluence Command Line Interface

Did you know that Confluence has a CLI? Check out and install Confluence Command Line Interface (CLI) as we may need it to gain access to Confluence via the command line to check against extracted content but I'll leave that up to you to decide if you want to use it or not.

For installation, please review Confluence CLI Installation and Use.

For getting started, reference, examples, and much more info, please review Confluence CLI User's Guide.

wget

Another component to automating the export process is using a command line network transfer tool such as wget. There are a few options out there for handling CLI transfers (such as curl) but I've found wget to be rather flexible, handles redirects well, and stable for my documentation needs. If you have arguments for or against, I'd love to hear them in the comments.

Setting up a "docbot" account for export

Prior to automating the export process from Confluence, you will want to create a non-human account that only has view and export permissions. If you don't plan on sharing or automating content extraction from Confluence, you can use your personal account but I've seen many tech writers get bitten by using their personal accounts.

In this case, I named this new account "docbot". If you don't have the proper credentials to create Atlassian accounts, please contact your Confluence administrator and request the account be created. Otherwise, create a new user account:

1. Navigate to the Confluence Admin page.
2. Click on Users under Users & Security section.
3. Click Add Users.
4. Enter docbot in Username field.
5. Enter docbot in Full Name field.
6. If you have a group email address that is shared with the tech writers, I recommend using that for the Email field. Otherwise, enter your email address.

With the docbot account created, we need to provide it with the proper permissions.

1. Navigate to your target space's Space Admin page and click on Permissions.
2. Under the Individual Users section, click the Edit Permission button.
3. Locate the docbot account and enable only the following permissions:
• All > View
• Space > Export
4. Once those two permissions have been set, click Save all.

Your docbot account should now have the proper permissions to export content from Confluence.

Bash script

Once you have ran through the process of creating and saving an export scheme from either one of the aforementioned plugins, you will need to apply the REST URL in our Bash script.

The Bash script will contain up to four lines: up to three variables and one command. You may wish to add a few additional lines before and after the export process to set up directories like adding a few commands for setting up an export archive and post processing the downloaded file (like renaming the .jar file to a .zip file, unzipping, it and so on).

...
USER='docbot'
PASS='<docbot's password>'
URL='<exporter scheme URL>'

wget --content-disposition "$URL&os_username=$USER&os_password=$PASS"
...


Breakdown of this script

The first three lines are just variables we will pass into the wget command. The fourth line is the backbone of the whole operation. Lets example each component of this command:

• wget - network transfer command
• --content-disposition - flag that will force the download to preserve the file name. Note: This flag is will experimental though I've never hand any problems with it.
• "$URL&os_username=$USER&os_password=$PASS" - string that gets passed into the wget command. When pulling content from Confluence using the exporter scheme URL, you need to specify the exporter URL, provide the user requesting it (which it get checked for proper credentials, and the password). If everything checks out properly on Confluence's side, your command will pull down a compressed file based on the settings in your exporter scheme.

As mentioned earlier, one could use curl to pull content from Confluence but I found that command to be unreliable at times on my Mac. Maybe it was may flag options or some other setting but wget has worked very well for me for years using this configuration.

Note: if your Bash script will be shared with other users or in a hosted environment, you may want to localize the USER and PASS variables in your Bash profile.

From here, you can add any steps to the Bash script to include post processing, executing node scripts to modify extracted content, or whatever else you need to include in this automated process. Or, if you need to use this process on a regular basis, you can simply set a cron or Jenkins job.

Happy automating!