Confluence Docs 3.0 : Integrating JIRA and Confluence This page last changed on Aug 27, 2008 by rkrishna. Take a look at the technical guide to the process of adding your Confluence EAR-WAR to JIRA Standalone JIRA and Confluence were designed to complement each other. We've all seen projects where people try to store all their knowledge in the issue tracker, and we've seen projects where people have suffered trying to track issues in a knowledge management tool. We say: collect your team's thoughts, plans and knowledge in Confluence, track your issues in JIRA, and let the two applications work together to help you get your job done. Here are four ways you can get JIRA and Confluence working together: use Confluence shortcuts to make easy links to JIRA issues, use trackback for two-way linking between Confluence and JIRA, use macros to include JIRA reports in Confluence pages, and integrate your JIRA and Confluence user management. ## Combine Confluence Shortcuts and JIRA Quick Search The simplest ideas can often be the most useful. In our Confluence site's global configuration - `Administration > Shorcut Links`, we have the following shortcut defined:
    JIRA: http://jira.atlassian.com/secure/QuickSearch.jspa?searchString=
This way, it's simple to create links using Confluence's shortcut notation. Link directly to JIRA issues: CONF-1000, or use JIRA's intuitive quick-search functionality to create links to particular groups of issue: CONF open improvements will link to a list of all open issues in the Confluence project of type "Improvement" (try it and see!) ## Use Trackback for easy two-way linking Activate Trackback in JIRA and Confluence, and if someone makes a link from one application to the other, the link will automatically lead both ways: create a link from a JIRA issue to an example in a Confluence page, and the Confluence page will automatically know to link back to the JIRA issue, and vice versa. This is the perfect way to keep discussion connected to an issue. Document your user stories or use-cases in Confluence, and see at a glance which issues affect each use-case. If a JIRA issue requires more discussion or thought than can be conveniently held in comments, link them to a Confluence page. (Note: as of Confluence 1.0 and JIRA 2.6, there is no mechanism for trackback to log in to JIRA or Confluence, so the use of trackback is limited to pages that are visible to anonymous visitors. In a protected Intranet environment, you may wish to open up Anonymous access to JIRA and Confluence to allow trackback to take place. Future revisions of the applications will give you the opportunity to allow Confluence to "log in" to JIRA and vice versa, avoiding this limitation) ## Use the {jiraissues} and {jiraportlet} macros to embed JIRA reports and portlets into your Confluence site Any JIRA search-result can be embedded in a Confluence page using the {jiraissues} macro with your choice of included fields and field ordering, and any JIRA dashboard portlet can be embedded in a Confluence page using the {jiraportlet} macro. This way you can incorporate information from JIRA into the normal flow of your knowledge management. Combined with other macros like {junitreport}, {rss} and {html-include} and the FatCow suite, you can create dashboards in Confluence consolidating information from across your project, with Confluence and JIRA at the centre. For Confluence 2.7.0 and later, an administrator can configure JIRA (3.12.0 or later) and Confluence to communicate in a trusted way, so that Confluence can request information from JIRA on behalf of the currently logged-in user. JIRA will not ask the user to log in again or to supply a password. Trusted communication is used when embedding information from one application (e.g. a list of JIRA issues) into another application (e.g. a Confluence page). Read more about trusted communication. ## Link to Confluence pages from JIRA issues While it is possible to simply paste links to Confluence pages into text fields of an issue (e.g. descriptions), the JIRA Linker Plugin provides a custom field that helps you find the correct page. ## Integrate JIRA and Confluence user-management To save you having to enter users into both JIRA and Confluence, you may benefit from using Atlassian Crowd as the user-repository for both applications. Alternatively you can configure Confluence to use JIRA's user database (this requires that you are using JIRA with an external database; it will not work if you are using JIRA with an embedded HSQL database). ## Some useful extensions JIRA Confluence portlet - Display a Confluence page on the JIRA dashboard. Atlassian Activity Stream Plugin - Activity Stream collects information from JIRA, Confluence, FishEye and Crucible. AppLinks Plugin - Allows you to link projects, spaces and repositories between JIRA, Confluence, FishEye, Crucible and SVN applications without the need for long URLs. ## And much more coming... When you buy a license for JIRA or Confluence, you are automatically entitled to a year of updates. We listen to our customers needs, and having our products complement and work well with each other is very important to us. So if there is any way you think Confluence and JIRA could be made to work better, suggest it in our discussion space, and it may very well end up in a future version. You might also like to take a look at our beyond JIRA page or watch the short video overview on some of these points in .mov format. Attachments: shorcuts.GIF (image/gif)

Document generated by Confluence on Nov 05, 2009 23:26