Restrict a specific page without giving access to the entire space

[Bandula Edirisinghe]

Hi, In my Jira confluence system, I restricted some pages for specific people by clicking through lock icon on top right. there I applied a few names in order for them to access only the page and its child pages. Then i was informed by the system message, to activate the restrictions, i might require giving access to space first. But the issue was when checked with the users, they can access the entire space. Please advice me a method to give access to those only for the page but not the entire space.

Bandula

[Staffan Redelius · Accepted solution]

Hi @Bandula Edirisinghe 

Ok so if I understand you correctly you want to hide everything in the space except for a specific page tree?

In that case you need to give the users at least read access to the space via space permissions. I guess they already have that since you mention that they see everything. 

The next step is to hide every page tree you don't want the users to see. Click on the padlock on every page tree and add the users or group to the View Permission. Then only those people or groups will have access to the page.

Best regards,
/Staffan

[Bandula Edirisinghe]

Thank you for the advice !!

[Bandula Edirisinghe]

If I can find a more simple way of doing this rather than applying restrictions to all other root pages..  

[Jason U]

In Confluence you can’t give someone access to a single page without also giving them access to the space it lives in.

How it works, in order:

1. Global / site permissions

2. Space permissions – decide who can view the space at all 

3. Page restrictions – further restrict people who already have space access (view / edit) 

So when the message told you “you may need to give space access first”, that was correct:
once you add them to the space, page restrictions can only reduce what they see, not grant access to just one page if they have no space permission.

Because of that, you can’t have: “user can only see this one page, nothing else in the space”.

Typical work-arounds:

• Put those sensitive pages in a separate space, give space access only to that small group, and keep your other content in another space. 

• Or keep them in the same space, but make sure every other page is restricted to a different group (this becomes hard to maintain at scale).

If you want to double-check your setup, compare what each user/group has under:

• Space settings → Permissions (who can view the space) 

• The page’s padlock → Restrictions (who can view/edit that specific page) 

[Bandula Edirisinghe]

In this case I cannot move them to a separate space. But i highly appreciate your suggestion.. Thank you !!!

[Barbara Szczesniak]

@Bandula Edirisinghe In addition to the information from others, see this page (if you haven't already) for more information on the various permissions/restrictions settings and inheritance—view permissions are inherited from the parent down the tree; edit restrictions apply at the page level only: https://support.atlassian.com/confluence-cloud/docs/add-or-remove-page-restrictions/ 

The reason this will take you some time is that you have to specify all the people who can view—there's no way to say "allow everyone but these people to view." You can do this faster if you have your User Admin put all the people who can view in one group and the others in a different group (with no overlap!).