How to hide the People Directory from a Confluence group

Summary

Confluence does not have a built in way to hide the People Directory from a group. You might not want their staff information (position, email, etc) to be visible to all Confluence users, for example in a publicly accessible instance of Confluence.

Solution

1. If you are using the Default Confluence Theme:

   1. Go to Confluence Admin > Layouts

   2. In Site Layouts section, click on Create custom link for Main Layout

      1. If the layout was edited preivously, you will see a Edit link instead.

   3. Add the code below before the </head> tag. Replace the <group_name> in the code with the name of the group that you which you want to to hide the people directory from.

      1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 #if ($userAccessor.hasMembership('<group_name>', $helper.action.remoteUser.name)) <style type="text/css"> #people-directory-link { display:none !important; } </style> #end

2. If you are using the Documentation Theme:

   1. Shutdown your Confluence

   2. Go to <CONF-INSTALL>/confluence/WEB-INF/atlassian-bundled-plugins

   3. Make a backup of the doctheme-x.x.x.jar.

   4. Create a new temporary folder.

   5. Extract the doctheme-x.x.x.jar into the temporary folder.

      • ℹ️ You can use common archiving tools, such as WinRAR or via the command line, to extract the jar

   6. Open the main.vmd file with from the following directory <TEMPORARY_FOLDER>/doctheme/decorators/

   7. Add the following code before the </head> tag in the file. Replace the <group_name> in the code with the name of the group which you want to to hide the people directory from.

      1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 #if ($userAccessor.hasMembership('<group_name>', $helper.action.remoteUser.name)) <style type="text/css"> #people-directory-link { display:none !important; } </style> #end

   8. Open the doctheme-x.x.x.jar with archiving tools such as winrar or winzip

   9. Add the main.vmd into the doctheme-x.x.x.jar to the path /doctheme/decorators/

   10. Replace the old jar in the <CONF-INSTALL>/confluence/WEB-INF/atlassian-bundled-plugins with the modified doctheme-x.x.x.jar

   11. Restart Confluence.