Inherited page permissions are not being respected

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Problem

Inherited page permissions in Confluence are not being applied. This can occur after installing and configuring plugins that import spaces, such as the Brikit Theme Press plugin.

Diagnosis

  1. Create some content, restrict a parent page, but do not restrict the children
    • Confirm that the child pages inherit the restrictions from the parent
    • Run select count(*) from CONFANCESTORS; and confirm the count is > 0
  2. Install Brikit Theme Press
  3. Go to Configure Theme Press and click Install
    • Run select count(*) from CONFANCESTORS; and confirm the count is 0
    • Test the child pages and confirm they are no longer restricted (NB: the parent page will still be restricted, but the children will not)

Cause

A post import task has deleted all the rows in the CONFANCESTORS table, which are used to determine inherited page permissions. This can occur if a plugin does not correctly specify the space key during import. This has occurred with Brikit Theme Press but could also occur with other plugins.

Workaround

Follow the instructions in this KB article to rebuild the CONFANCESTORS table. This will take ~15 minutes for larger instances.

Post fix:

As soon as this process is done the pages will no longer be able to be accessed by people who do not have permission to them. However, they may still show up in places where they should not.

  • Search: You may need to rebuild the full index after this is done, if you determine that child pages are able to be searched for.
  • Popular Content: If child pages are showing in the popular content stream, you can simply rebuild the edge index at http://<your-confluence-url>plugins/servlet/edge-index/build. This will reindex the popular dashboard only.
Last modified on Nov 2, 2018

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