Summary

Using the REST API can be helpful in automating certain operations within Confluence.

For instance, a Confluence administrator may need to schedule a reindex and monitor its progress.  However, going through the User Interface (UI) could be rather impractical depending the time and needs.

This document provides a step-by-step procedure on how to use the Confluence REST API to trigger a site reindex and how to monitor it.

The suggested solution is provided as a set of bash commands using curl and jq to run the REST API call and manipulate json output.

You may use this example to create an automation tool on your preferred coding language.

Solution

We are using personal access tokens for better security. For information on how to create personal access tokens, refer to our documentation, Using Personal Access Tokens.

Triggering a new full site reindex.

To trigger a new full site reindex, you can use the REST API below:

curl -H "Authorization: Bearer <token>" --request POST "<Instance URL>/rest/prototype/latest/index/reindex" --header "Content-Type: application/json" --data "" 

This should trigger a new full-site content reindex.

Monitoring the reindex progress.

Confluence breaks data from the database to be reindexed in 3 phases, 

• CONTENT_ONLY - Every content except attachment and user data.
• ATTACHMENT_ONLY - Attachment data
• USER_ONLY - User related data.

Every phase has its own progress level, which you can check in the logs or by using the call /json/reindextaskprogress.action 

USER_NAME=<username> ### You must be Confluence Administrator
USER_PASSWORD=<user password>
CONFLUENCE_BASEURL=<Confluence Base URL> ### FQDN and context path without the trailing slash

curl -u <username>:<password> -X GET "http://localhost:8090/json/reindextaskprogress.action" | python -mjson.tool

{
    "compactElapsedTime": "12:12:17",
    "count": "3020121",
    "percentageComplete": "67",
    "total": "2051956"
}

The UI displays the total progress of all three phases combined, that said, to get this result using rest API we can use the following:

curl -H "Authorization: Bearer <token>" -X GET "https://<instance url>/rest/rebuildindex/latest/job"

 You will ideally see an output like this:

{
    "id": "f312058e-4730-4ba6-b793-6aa98019023b",
    "startTime": 1717686329,
    "duration": 385,
    "stage": "REBUILDING",
    "acknowledged": false,
    "progress": 18,
    "nodes": [
        {
            "nodeId": "da0e1b05",
            "state": "REBUILDING",
            "progress": 0
        }
    ],
    "createdBy": "admin",
    "type": "SITE"
} 

We can use it together with the "jq" to filter it out and get only the progress number:

curl -H "Authorization: Bearer <token>" -X GET "https://<instance url>/rest/rebuildindex/latest/job" |jq -r ".progress"