⚠️ conflr is retired! ⚠️

conflr is an R package to post R Markdown documents to Confluence, a content collaboration tool by Atlassian.

While the package still can be found useful, we decided to archive the project at the beginning of July 2023.

The main reason is that conflr will be superseded by Quarto. Quarto v1.3 gained the functionality to publish documents into Confluence (the official announcement. This looks promising. At the moment, there might be some missing features compared to conflr, but it should be just a matter of time before Quarto supersedes conflr in all aspects, considering it’s one of Posit’s flagship projects.

Another reason is that conflr has a technical debt; the primary target of conflr was the on-premise version of Confluence. The on-premise version will be sunset in Feb 2024, so conflr should also switch to the cloud version. However, since the on-premise version and the cloud version have different syntax and plugins, it’s not easy to migrate. Considering we don’t have much development bandwidth for this project, we conclude it’s not really feasible to support the cloud version.

Thank you for all your support on conflr. While it’s a bit sad to announce the retirement, we are very happy to see this great evolution in the documentation ecosystem!

Installation

Install conflr from CRAN with:

install.packages("conflr")

Alternatively, if you need the development version, install it with:

# install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("line/conflr")

Preparation

conflr uses these environmental variables to access your Confluence.

CONFLUENCE_URL: The base URL of your Confluence. e.g. https://confluence.example.com (On Atlassian Cloud, https://<your-domain>.atlassian.net/wiki).
CONFLUENCE_USERNAME: Your username (On Atlassian Cloud, your email address).
CONFLUENCE_PASSWORD: Your password (On Atlassian Cloud, your API token. For more details about API token, please read the official document).

There are several ways to set these environmental variables. The quickest way is to enter in the popups that are displayed when you run the addin (see Usages section below). The inputs are cached in the environmental variables listed above by default.

Another way is to set the variables in the .Renviron file (you can open the file with usethis::edit_r_environ()). For example, you can set the base URL in the file as the following.

CONFLUENCE_URL=https://confluence.example.com

Usages

conflr provides the following ways to post R Markdown documents to Confluence.

Use an RStudio Addin
Run confl_create_post_from_Rmd() on console
Specify conflr::confluence_document on the YAML front-matter

RStudio Addin

1. Move focus to the .Rmd file and click “Post to Confluence” Addin

(Caution for those who are not familiar with R Markdown: R Markdown’s powerfulness allows you to execute arbitrary code; be sure about what the code does before clicking “Post to Confluence”!)

Then, you will be asked your username and password.

2. Check the preview and click “Publish”

type: The type of the page (page means a normal wiki page, whereas blogpost mean a blog post, not a page).
Space Key: The key of the space you want to post.
Parent page ID: (optional): The ID of the parent page to the page.
Use original image sizes: If checked, do not resize the images.
Fold code blocks: If checked, code blocks are folded by default.
TOC: If checked, add a Table of Contents.
TOC depth: The lowest heading level to include in the Table of Contents.

3. Check the result

`confl_create_post_from_Rmd()`

If you don’t use RStudio, you can use confl_create_post_from_Rmd(). The basic usage is

confl_create_post_from_Rmd("~/path/to/your.Rmd")

Batch use

If you want to use this function without interaction, specify interactive = FALSE. This skips any confirmations or previews.

confl_create_post_from_Rmd("~/path/to/your.Rmd", interactive = FALSE)

Note that, if you want to run this periodically, you also need to set update = TRUE to allow conflr to overwrite the existing page.

confl_create_post_from_Rmd("~/path/to/your.Rmd", interactive = FALSE, update = TRUE)

`conflr::confluence_document`

conflr’s functionality is also available as a custom R Markdown format; You can specify conflr::confluence_document to output in the front matter of your R Markdown document.

For example, if you set the following front matter, pressing Knit button on RStudio (or running rmarkdown::render()) will publish the R Markdown document to Confluence.

---
title: "title1"
output:
  conflr::confluence_document:
    space_key: "space1"
    update: true
---

...

For the detail about available options, please refer to ?confluence_document.

Options

conflr recognizes these options:

conflr_supported_syntax_highlighting: A character vector of languages that your Confluence supports the syntax highlighting in addition to the default languages (by default, sql, cpp, python, html, css, bash, and yaml are supported).
conflr_addin_clear_password_after_success: If TRUE, unset CONFLUENCE_PASSWORD after the page is successfully uploaded via addin.

Know limitations

LaTeX support

conflr supports Math expressions to some extent. But, it requires LaTeX Math addon installed. Otherwise, you will see “unknown macro” errors on the page.

htmlwidgets (e.g. leaflet, plotly)

conflr doesn’t support htmlwidgets-based packages like leaflet and plotly. Instead, you can embed the screenshot by setting screenshot.force = TRUE in the chunk option (c.f. https://bookdown.org/yihui/bookdown/html-widgets.html).

Advanced Usages

conflr is also a (non-complete) binding to Confluence’s REST API. These low-level functions might be useful when you need to access to your Confluence programmatically.

library(conflr)

# list pages
res <- confl_list_pages(spaceKey = "foo")
purrr::map_chr(res$results, "id")

# get page info
page <- confl_get_page(res$results[[2]]$id)
page$title

# create a page
new_page <- confl_post_page(
  spaceKey = "foo",
  title = "Test",
  body = glue::glue(
    '<ac:structured-macro ac:name="code">
     <ac:plain-text-body><![CDATA[this is my code]]></ac:plain-text-body>
     </ac:structured-macro>
    '))
new_page$`_links`

How to contribute

See CONTRIBUTING.md

License

Copyright (C) 2019 LINE Corporation

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation, version 3.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with this program.  If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.

See LICENSE.md for more detail.

line / conflr