Here’s a chart of the types of permissions that may be granted to a user or group on a Confluence Space.

These values would be useful in conjunction with a script that did something like setting permissions on a Confluence Space.

“Delete Own” is undocumented by Atlassian, but maps to a value of “REMOVEOWNCONTENT”. 

“Restrictions – Add/Delete” is referenced as “Pages – Restrict” in the Atlassian documentation, which is neither clear nor helpful.

 

     

Name Description Programmatic Value    
   
   
         
View View all content in the space VIEWSPACE    
         
Pages – Create Create new pages and edit existing ones EDITSPACE    
         
Pages – Export Export pages to PDF, Word EXPORTPAGE    
         
Restrictions – Add/Delete Set page-level permissions SETPAGEPERMISSIONS    
         
Pages – Remove Remove pages REMOVEPAGE    
         
News – Create Create news items and edit existing ones EDITBLOG    
         
News – Remove Remove news REMOVEBLOG    
         
Comments – Create

Here’s some code that explores one of the basic tenets of programmatically managing Confluence: retrieving a

list of administrators for a given Space.

On it’s own this code doesn’t do much, but it is foundational to many more complicated solutions that you may be asked to code.

 import com.atlassian.confluence.security.SpacePermissionManager
import com.atlassian.confluence.spaces.SpaceManager
import com.atlassian.sal.api.component.ComponentLocator
//Import the libraries

def spacePermissionManager = ComponentLocator.getComponent(SpacePermissionManager)
def spaceManager = ComponentLocator.getComponent(SpaceManager)
//Invoke the Space Manager by telling the Component Locator to retrieve it for us

def sourceSpace = spaceManager.getSpace("<Space Key>")
//Tell the Space Manager which space we're querying
def admins = []
//Define the list of admins as an array

spaceManager.getSpaceAdmins(sourceSpace).each{ permission ->
admins.add(permission.name)
//For each administrator that the Space Manager returns from the target space, add that name to the array

//Do something else with the names
}

return admins
//Print the list of administrators.
 

 

As you can see, the bulk of the code is just structural, and is similar to other scripts you may have created.  The key is using the Space Manager to fetch the details about the target Space, and then parsing those details for the information you need.

 

 

 

 

The basic management of Confluence Space permissions is quite trivial. However if you spend any time on the internet looking for a solution, you’ll find yourself going in circles, or starting to believe that Space permissions management is only possible via the front-end.

There are essentially two ways in which an Atlassian product may be programmatically managed. It may be done via the REST API, or you may use a plugin such a ScriptRunner that allows you to write Groovy scripts that make use of internal Atlassian classes and methods.

There is currently no obvious or easy way to use the REST API to make permissions changes to a Confluence Space on Confluence Server.   Please note that this is different that permissions management of individual Confluence pages.

Instead what we need to do is look backwards, to the JSON RPC system that Atlassian used to use.

What I like about these RPC calls is that I can call them using CURL, or I can access the library through the ScriptRunner Console.  Here’s the basic code:

 import com.atlassian.confluence.rpc.soap.services.SpacesSoapService
import com.atlassian.sal.api.component.ComponentLocator

def addSpacePermission = ComponentLocator.getComponent(SpacesSoapService)
def String[] permissions = ["EDITSPACE"]
def String remoteEntity = "<UserOrGroup>"
def String spaceKey = "<spaceKey>"

addSpacePermission.addPermissionsToSpace(permissions, remoteEntity,