Markdown to Confluence with Ruby and SOAP

This post follows on from my previous post about the SharePoint to Markdown ripper. You can go back and read it if you’d like.

So once I’d extracted our SharePoint wiki as markdown, it was time to find a way to import that into Confluence.

I’d used the markdown editor of the Insert Markup function which worked great, but for ~300 separate pages, I needed a slightly more efficient method than copy paste into a text box.

My first thought was to try find a SOAP or REST API to perform the page creation. I presumed since the Insert Markup function could do it, there might be an API for it. However I wasn’t able to find anything to provide Markdown page creation. So I needed to find another answer.

I found a GitHub repo for a markdown to confluence uploader designed to import a single markdown file into an existing page using the Confluence SOAP api.

Obviously I needed something to iterate through a directory of files, and to create, rather than use an existing page, but it seemed like a good start.

So I forked the repo and added an option to provide a parent page to house the newly created pages.

I then used awk and xargs to iterate through the files importing under a page I’d created for the legacy wiki.

ls output/ | awk '{ print "output/" $1 }' | xargs -I {} ./md2confl.rb -s SS -c http://myconfluence.net -t1671258 --markdownFile {}

This imported my 300 legacy SharePoint pages into Confluence in a flash.

However, there were some conversion issues, so this is still a work in progress.

The script I forked uses the markdown2confluence gem, which by it’s own admission is not a 100% conversion.

In fact there is an outstanding issue regarding the nested list problem that I faced on the gem’s GitHub page. I intend to fork and submit a pull request to solve this issue when I get a chance.

All in all, this gets me almost to the point of being able to move across to Confluence. I hope it might help someone else in the same boat.

Get the source

Fork or clone the markdown to confluence uploader on GitHub. Issues and pull requests welcome!