Automation basics
Understand the general concepts and best practices of automation in Atlassian Cloud products.
Triggers in Confluence automation
Automation is a new admin feature available in Confluence Premium and Enterprise. Read the announcement in this community post to learn more.
Rules always begin with a trigger component. The trigger is the catalyst that sets your rule in motion.
In Confluence, that might be a product-based event like “when a new page is published”, or it might be a time-based event like “when it’s Tuesday at 10am”.
If you're in Space automation, the rule runs each time the triggering event happens in the space you’re in. If you're in Global automation, it will execute each time the triggering event happens in any space in your Confluence site — or the spaces you specify.
Confluence triggers
These triggers are specific to automation for Confluence and can be used to automate spaces (Space automation) and sites (Global automation).
Pages and blogs
Page published
This trigger runs your rule any time a new page is published.
This doesn’t include pages created as drafts or subsequent updates when the page is edited. “Page” in this context is a distinct content type from “blog”.
Blog published
This trigger runs your rule any time a new blog post is published.
This doesn’t include blogs created as drafts or subsequent updates when the blog is edited.
Page edited
This trigger runs your rule each time edits to an existing page are published.
“Page” in this context is a distinct content type from “blog”.
Blog edited
This trigger runs your rule each time edits to an existing blog post are published.
Page or blog labeled
In its default state, this trigger runs your rule each time any label is added to a page or blog post.
You have the option to configure it by selecting specific labels from a dropdown. If you add more than one label, the rule will trigger each time any one of those labels are added.
Page or blog commented
This trigger runs your rule each time an inline or page comment is added to a page or blog post.
This doesn’t include when an existing comment is edited.
User mentioned
In its default state, this trigger runs your rule if any user or group is mentioned on a page or blog post (including in a comment).
You have the option to configure it by selecting specific users and/or groups from a dropdown. If you add more than one, the rule will trigger each time any of your selections are mentioned.
General triggers
If you’ve used automation for Jira, you’ll recognize some of the same general triggers like Scheduled and Incoming webhook. You’ll configure them in the same way, but they won’t currently function across products. This is on our roadmap.
Scheduled
Scheduled
This trigger runs your rule at a recurring time that you set.
Use the dropdowns to add Basic configuration, or use cron expressions in the Advanced tab to control nuanced timing down to the second.
Cron expressions are composed of a string of values, separated by spaces, to denote Second, Minute, Hour, Days of the month, Days of the week, Year.
Unlike in Jira, the Scheduled trigger doesn’t support queries in Confluence.
If a scheduled rule fails to execute (serves a Failure status in the automation audit log) 10 times in a row, it automatically disables.
Integrations (third-party)
Incoming webhook
This trigger executes your rule when an HTTP POST is sent to a specified webhook URL.
A webhook is a way for a third party to trigger an automation rule.
When configuring this trigger, you’ll receive a unique URL that you can either add to the third-party application’s outgoing webhook configuration, or make an HTTP POST request from your custom scripts.
You can use the {{webhookData}} smart value to reference the custom data provided by the webhook in your rule.
Was this helpful?