Manage users
A Confluence user is a person who can read or update a Confluence site. You can choose whether your Confluence site is accessible to anonymous users (people who have not logged in) or only to logged-in users. See Setting Up Public Access.
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See centralized user management.
Confluence user management
You can add users to Confluence, and then assign them permissions that determine their access to the content and administrative functions in your Confluence site. You can also collect users into groups, and assign the permissions to groups for easier management. See the following topics:
By default, Confluence stores its users and groups in the Confluence database. This is called the internal directory. You can choose to connect Confluence to an external userbase instead, such as Microsoft Active Directory or another LDAP server. You can also use Atlassian Crowd and Jira applications as directory managers. When you add a user or group to Confluence, it will be added to the external directory too, based on your configuration options. See Configuring User Directories.
Authentication
Seraph
Almost all authentication in Confluence (and Jira applications) is performed through Seraph, Atlassian's open source web authentication framework. The goal of Seraph is to provide a simple, extensible authentication system that we can use on any application server.
Seraph is implemented as a servlet filter. Its sole job is, given a web request, to associate that request with a particular user (or no user if the request is anonymous). It supports several methods of authentication, including HTTP Basic Authentication, form-based authentication, and looking up credentials already stored in the user's session.
Seraph itself performs no user management functions. It merely checks the credentials of the incoming request and delegates any user management functions (looking up a user, checking a user's password) to Confluence's user management system.
If you want to integrate Confluence with your own single sign-on (SSO) infrastructure, you would do so by installing Atlassian Crowd or by writing a custom Seraph authenticator. See our developer documentation on HTTP authentication with Seraph.
XML-RPC and SOAP authentication
Normally, requests for Confluence's XML-RPC and SOAP APIs (deprecated) will include an authentication token as the first argument. With this method of authentication, XML-RPC and SOAP authentication requests are checked directly against the user management framework, and tokens are assigned directly by the remote API subsystem. These requests do not pass through Seraph authenticators.
However, if the token argument is blank, Seraph will be used as a fallback authentication method for remote API requests. So, to use a custom Seraph authenticator with XML-RPC or SOAP requests, ensure that you pass an empty string as the authentication token to remote API methods.
Password authentication
By default, password authentication is delegated from Seraph to the user management system. This is not necessary, however. Single sign-on systems may have no password authentication at all, and get all the necessary credentials from the SSO provider.
SAML single sign-on
If you have a Confluence Data Center license you can connect Confluence to your SAML 2.0 identity provider for authentication and single sign-on.
See Single sign-on for Confluence Data Center for more information.