TL;DRMark — a tool for syncing your Markdown with Confluence

1. Convert Confluence To Markdown
2. Confluence Export Markdown
3. Import Markdown Into Confluence Tutorial
4. Import Markdown Into Confluence Software

Confluance’s web doc editor is very powerfull, but I a markdown guy, I write everything in markdown in pure text mode and versioning it. To convert markdown to Confluance. Checked on the official doc, it says that Confluence supports markdown import, but after a test, not really, at least not for table. Paste the code below into an empty page; Make sure the Markdown Syntax 1.2 is installed and activated. The script uses this to convert Markdown from Github to XWiki syntax. Make sure you've installed and activated the Git API. This script uses that API to clone the Github Wiki as a Git repository.

Oh man, I was so frustrated when I was trying to edit docs in Confluence, and itbroke all my text, trying to adjust any tags led to breaking the text even more.I felt the same when Slack introduced their Wysiwyg editor that solved problems that never existed,but at least they added an option to disable it.

Wysiwyg is the Devil’s Playground, but there is a solution.

Store with Git, write in Markdown, automatically sync with Confluence. Interesting? Let me tell youabout seven benefits that you could have if you could use Git for storing your docs instead of editingthem directly in Confluence:

Convert Confluence To Markdown

1. Git
   Confluence has a history of changes, but it’s very limited: you can’t do git blame,you can’t do git log -S to search who added a specific text.

2. Pull Requests
   Now, someone with a fresh set of eyes can identify problems and provide suggestions for docs.You write code — someone reviews it, you write a book — someone reviews it.Now, you write docs — someone reviews it.

3. Instruments
   We have some great tools like VSCode, Neovim, Sublime, or Idea with all required set ofextensions that make our coding even more efficient and less frustrating.

   Then why not using it for writing docs? It’s more efficient than Wysiwyg for sure.

4. No context switching
   No need to jump around to read docs a bit. Just open it up in your editorbecause you store the docs near to the code.

5. Hosting Agnostic
   You can just push your docs on GitHub if you want to open source it.

6. Decentralization
   Everyone has their own complete copy of docs, develops it, and syncs up later.

7. Continuous Integration
   If you have a proper tool that I’m going to introduce, you can automatically update your docs inConfluence after a successful git push.

Mark reads your Markdown file, creates a Confluence page if it doesn’t, uploadsattachments if any, translates Markdown into HTML, and updates the contents of the page via REST API.

It’s like you don’t even need to create sections/pages in your Confluence anymore, just mention them inyour .md files.

Confluence Export Markdown

Mark uses an extended file format, which, still being valid markdown, contains several HTML-ishmetadata headers, which can be used to locate page inside Confluence instance and update itaccordingly.

Example

mark.md

Mark will upload file images/screenshot.png as an attachment, create a page in Confluence by thefollowing path:
Dev / Automation / Documentation → Sync Markdown to Confluence, then renderMarkdown as HTML and put the contents via REST API on the user’s behalf.

Continuous Integration

It’s quite trivial to integrate Mark into a CI/CD system, here is an example with Snake CIin case of self-hosted Bitbucket Server / Data Center.

In this example, I’m using the kovetskiy/mark image for creating a job container where therepository with documentation will be cloned to. The following command finds all *.md files and runs mark against them one by one:

The following directive tells the CI to run this particular job only if the changes are pushed into themain branch. It means you can safely push your changes into feature branches without being afraidthat they automatically shown in Confluence, then go through the reviewal process and automaticallydeploy them when PR got merged.

Import Markdown Into Confluence Tutorial

Links

Mark is open source and available on GitHub: github.com/kovetskiy/mark

Follow me on Twitter: @reconquestio

Import Markdown Into Confluence Software