How to Use Confluence to Serve Static Content
This is out of the scope of Atlassian support
Sometimes, it would be handy to use Confluence to serve static content.
Confluence relies on Apache Tomcat as the application server. Tomcat will serve any files which are in its root directory. In Confluence, this root directory is in <CONFLUENCE_INSTALL>/confluence/.
Serving Static Content Outside Confluence
Important - Bug Report
In order for below instructions to work, as reported in CONFSERVER-53166 - Getting issue details... STATUS , we do need to either inject custom HTML options in the code header or will need to place the code in a different location. Prior proceeding with below steps, please, check the above mentioned bug.
Any file you place in <CONFLUENCE_INSTALL>/confluence/ will be served as an independent file and Confluence's style will not apply to it. This can be useful to:
- Serve static HTML pages.
- Store content (CSS, JavaScript, images,...) you want to reference or link from other Confluence pages (or even other sites).
- Add files you want end users to download without the size limitations of Confluence.
- Place your
robots.txtto set rules for the search engines.
Accessing the content is easy. If you save a file in the location <CONFLUENCE_INSTALL>/confluence/myfile.html you should be able to access it in the URL http://<confluence-url>/myfile.html. HTML files will be rendered. Other file types will be displayed as plain text or downloaded depending on your browser. Modern browsers are normally able to reproduce media content (audio, video, pdf files) in the browser. You can also create your own folders to organize your files. In this case you will need to add the directory name to the URL to access the file (i.e.: http://<confluence-url>/mydir/myfile.html).
Confluence session and permissions do not apply to such static files, and the files would be available via URL without any login requirement. Please also make sure that your
web.xml
file does not have a filter to disable .html files from being displayed. This is not an issue with the default configuration in Confluence 5.9+, but this issue occurs in previous versions and instances with Tomcat customisations.
Creating shorter URLs for certain pages
As Tomcat serves HTML, we can use HTML to redirect to a particular Confluence page using a shorter URL. This functionality is similar to the tiny links described in Linking to Confluence pages from other websites, but with two main advantages:
- The link will not depend on the page id, so you can avoid running into CONF-27049 - Getting issue details... STATUS .
- You can give the link a meaningful name.
As an example, imagine we have a Confluence space called Support (space key is SUP) and we want to give the home page of the space (http://my.confluence.com/display/SUP/Support+Home) a URL that is easier to remember (e.g., http://my.confluence.com/support). To accomplish this we would:
- Create a file called
supportin<CONFLUENCE_INSTALL>/confluence/. Add the following HTML to the file:
<html> <head> <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;URL=http://my.confluence.com/display/SUP/Support+Home"> </head> <body> </body> </html>
After this, every request to http://my.confluence.com/support will be redirected to http://my.confluence.com/display/SUP/Support+Home.
Any change to the title of the page will need to be manually modified in the file containing the HTML for the redirection.