Confluence Page Import (Obsidian Plugin)

Confluence Page Import is an Obsidian plugin that imports Confluence pages into local Markdown notes. Each import is manual and strictly one-way — content flows from Confluence to your vault, and the plugin never writes to Confluence. Before anything touches your note, a read-only diff preview shows exactly what would change; you then choose Pull & Replace (take the Confluence version) or Cancel (Keep Local) (change nothing). Conversion from Confluence storage format to Markdown happens inside the plugin — no external tools such as Pandoc or command-line converters are required.

Who is this for?

• Technical teams who keep working notes in Obsidian but whose team documentation lives in Confluence — import specs, runbooks, or meeting pages next to your own notes and refresh them on demand.
• Knowledge workers who want a local, searchable, offline-readable Markdown copy of specific Confluence pages they reference often.
• Enterprise evaluators who need a tool with a verifiable safety story: read-only against Confluence by construction, credential host/protocol guards, metadata-only logging, published security policy, and attested release artifacts.

If you need to publish notes to Confluence, this plugin is intentionally the wrong tool — it has no write capability (see docs/COMPARISON.md for workflow alternatives).

Features

• Manual Import from Confluence: Right-click any markdown note to pull the linked Confluence page into it. Sync is always user-triggered — the plugin never syncs automatically in the background.
• One-way pull (read-only for Confluence): A sync fetches the remote page, compares it with your note, and applies the result ONLY to your local note. Your Confluence pages are never modified.
• Difference Detection: Detects when the Confluence page differs from your local note before changing anything.
• Read-only Diff Preview: Before anything is written, a preview window shows exactly what differs — your current local lines (green) versus the incoming Confluence lines (blue). The preview is display-only: you either take the Confluence version in full (Pull & Replace) or keep your note as-is (Cancel (Keep Local)). There is no per-block merging.
• Empty-page protection: If the Confluence page converts to an empty body, the pull is aborted instead of blanking your note.
• Smart URL Parsing: Automatically detects Page ID, Space, and Title from various Confluence URL formats.
• Version Tracking: Records the pulled page version in the note's confluence-version frontmatter.
• Credential safety: The configured Base URL is required, and credentials are only ever sent to that exact protocol + host. Notes whose confluence-url points to a different host — or downgrades https to http — are rejected before any request is made.
• External-change protection: If the note is modified (by you, another device, or another plugin) while the preview window is open, applying is aborted with a clear notice and nothing is overwritten; you can close the preview and re-sync.
• One sync per note at a time: Duplicate triggers while a sync (including its preview window) is in progress are safely ignored.

Requirements

• Obsidian 1.13.0 or newer (minAppVersion in the plugin manifest — required by the declarative settings API that makes this plugin's settings searchable).
• Desktop only (the plugin uses desktop file APIs for logging).

Installation

From Community Plugins

1. Open Obsidian Settings > Community Plugins
2. Turn off "Restricted mode"
3. Click "Browse" and search for "Confluence Page Import"
4. Click Install and then Enable

Manual Installation

1. Get the release archive confluence-import-1.0.16.zip (or the three files main.js, manifest.json, styles.css).
2. Create a folder confluence-import in your vault's .obsidian/plugins/ directory.
3. Extract/put the three files flat in that folder.
4. Reload Obsidian and enable the plugin.

Setup Guide

1. Get your API Token:

   • Confluence Cloud (atlassian.net): create an API token from your Atlassian account — see the official guide, Manage API tokens for your Atlassian account.
   • Self-hosted Confluence: click your Profile picture → Settings → Personal Access Tokens, create a token, and copy it.

2. Configure Plugin:

   • Open Obsidian Settings -> Confluence Page Import.
   • Enter your Confluence Base URL (required — credentials are only sent to this exact protocol + host, e.g. https://mycompany.atlassian.net; http downgrades are blocked).
   • Enter your Confluence User Email.
   • Paste your API Token (Unicode characters in email/token are supported).
   • (Optional) Enter a default Space Key.
   • (Optional) Cache page IDs — caches resolved page IDs for 1 hour to speed up repeat syncs; the cache persists across syncs while the plugin is loaded. Disable it if you frequently move pages in Confluence.
   • (Optional) Enable debug logging — writes a metadata-only debug log (see Debug Logging).

3. Test Connection:

   • Click Test Connection. It validates your credentials against the configured Base URL and reports the result as an Obsidian notice (configure the Base URL first — the button will remind you otherwise).

Usage

1. Prepare your Note: Add a confluence-url property to your note's frontmatter:

   ---
   confluence-url: https://confluence.example.com/display/SPACEKEY/My+Page+Title
   ---

2. Import from Confluence (manual, user-triggered):

   • Right-click the note in the File Explorer or Editor.
   • Select Import from Confluence.
   • Or use the Command Palette: Confluence Page Import: Import current note from Confluence.
   • Or click the sync ribbon icon.

   Note: syncing only happens when you trigger it. There is no automatic or background sync, and Confluence is never modified.

3. Review the Diff Preview (if the contents differ):

   • If the local note and remote page are identical, nothing changes (the confluence-version frontmatter is refreshed to the current remote version).
   • If they differ, a read-only preview window opens showing your local lines (green) and the incoming Confluence lines (blue). Nothing has been written at this point.
   • Click Pull & Replace to replace your local note body with the Confluence version in full. The confluence-version frontmatter is set to the fetched remote version; other frontmatter properties (tags, aliases, etc.) are preserved. Confluence itself is never changed.
   • Click Cancel (Keep Local) to keep your note exactly as it is — nothing is written and the version marker is NOT updated, so the same differences will be shown again on your next sync.
   • If the note changed while the preview was open (another device, plugin, or manual edit), the pull is aborted with a clear notice and nothing is written. Close the preview and re-sync to continue.
   • If the Confluence page converts to an empty body, the pull is aborted to protect your note.

   Local edits are never merged back to Confluence. If you need your local wording on the page, edit the page in Confluence itself, then pull.

Large Pages

Syncing very large Confluence pages (content over 1 MB) shows a one-time notice that the sync may take longer and use extra memory. The sync always continues — the notice is informational only. Difference details are computed lazily when the preview window opens, keeping normal syncs lean.

Debug Logging

When Enable debug logging is on, the plugin writes debug.log in its plugin folder. Privacy and safety guarantees:

• Metadata only: lengths, counts, timings, and statuses. Note bodies, page content, tokens, emails, and URL query strings are never written — sensitive fields are redacted before hitting disk.
• Bounded size: the active log rotates to debug.log.1 at 1 MB, keeping a single rotated generation.
• Vault-scoped storage: the log lives in the plugin's own folder inside your vault's .obsidian directory and is written exclusively through Obsidian's vault adapter API — the plugin does not touch files outside the vault.
• Writes are asynchronous and flushed when the plugin unloads.

Security & Privacy

• Pull-only by construction: the plugin has no code paths that write to Confluence (GET requests only).
• Credential scope: credentials are only sent to the exact protocol + host of your configured Base URL. Note URLs with a different host, an http downgrade, embedded user:pass@, or non-http(s) schemes are rejected before any request.
• Plaintext token storage: like all Obsidian plugin settings, your API token is stored unencrypted in the plugin's data.json. Exclude it from shared/synced vaults and rotate tokens periodically — see SECURITY.md for details and the private vulnerability reporting process (GitHub Security Advisories).
• Remote content hardening: dangerous link schemes (javascript:, data:, etc.) are stripped during conversion, and Confluence macro titles are sanitized so remote page authors cannot inject Markdown structure into your notes.
• Supply chain: CI enforces npm audit --omit=dev = 0 on every push; Dependabot monitors dependencies weekly; a CycloneDX SBOM can be generated with npm run sbom. Release zips are built deterministically — the same source always produces the same SHA-256, so you can rebuild from source and byte-compare any published artifact. Bundled third-party licenses are listed in THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md.
• Repository: source code, issues, and security reporting live at github.com/hikosalaidarkcommit/confluence-import.

Troubleshooting

• Authentication Failed (401/403): Check your email and API token, and that you have permission to view the page.
• Page Not Found (404): Ensure the URL is correct and the page exists.
• Rate limit exceeded (429): Confluence is throttling requests — wait a moment and retry.
• "Blocked sync: this note's confluence-url points to …": the note's URL host or protocol does not match your configured Base URL. Fix the note or the setting.
• "The note was modified while the sync dialog was open": expected protection against losing concurrent edits; close the preview and re-sync.
• "The Confluence page appears empty after conversion": the pull was aborted to protect your note — check the page content on Confluence.
• Network Error: Check your internet connection.

Documentation

• FAQ — direct answers: does it modify Confluence, background sync, mobile, credentials storage, formatting limits, and more
• Troubleshooting — error messages and fixes
• Pull Preview Guide — how the diff preview and Pull & Replace / Cancel work
• Workflow comparison — this plugin vs copy/paste, export/conversion pipelines, and publishing tools
• Docs index — current docs vs historical design archive

Version History Notes

Pre-1.0.8 behavior change: very early versions offered a "Push to Confluence" action that uploaded notes to Confluence. That capability was removed entirely in 1.0.8 — the code paths that could update pages or upload attachments were deleted, not merely disabled. Since then the plugin has been strictly one-way (Confluence → local note). See CHANGELOG.md for the full history.

Development

npm install        # setup
npm run dev        # development build (watch mode)
npm run build      # typecheck + production build
npm test           # full unit/integration test suite (Jest)
npm run test:memory   # standalone large-page memory verification (child process)
npm run package    # local release package: test + build + staged zip under release/
npm run verify:release   # verify the packaged zip (whitelist, hashes, manifest)

npm run package produces release/confluence-import-<version>.zip containing exactly three files (main.js, manifest.json, styles.css) for manual installation. See CONTRIBUTING.md for details.