Lock attachments in Confluence Cloud

Question

Is there a way to lock an attachment in Confluence Cloud while someone else is editing using Atlassian Companion?

We would not like to have a file editing by 2 people at the same time.

Alzhan Group LLC · Answer

Hi Jake — six years late, but this is still sitting unanswered so worth closing the loop.

Short answer: no, and it's not something any Cloud app can fully deliver. Confluence Cloud doesn't expose a hook that fires before an attachment upload — every event an app can listen for fires after the write has already happened. So nothing can block a second person's save the way Server-side locking could.

What is possible is check-out and detection: mark a file as spoken for, and if someone uploads over it anyway, get notified within a couple of minutes, see exactly what changed, and restore the earlier version. Different guarantee, same underlying problem addressed — the part I haven't found anything built in for, six years after Shannon's answer above, is telling the person whose work got overwritten. A correction to my earlier wording: CONFCLOUD-65425 and CONFCLOUD-65595, the two tickets Shannon linked, are not open. Both were closed Won't Fix in October 2023 with the comment that the Companion app, removed from Cloud in 2022, was deprecated. The ticket that still covers locking is CONFCLOUD-2841.

Disclosure: I built a Forge app that does this — Attachment Guard, free up to 10 users. There's also Cenote Lockpoint, which has offered check-in/check-out on Cloud since 2022 and has a much longer track record than mine — worth comparing both against what you actually need.

https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/4098515834/attachment-guard

Happy to answer anything about how the detection side works if it's useful.

Shannon S · Answer

Hello Jake,

Thank you for asking about this. We have a few related feature requests for this.

The one that you are asking for specifically is this one:

* CONFCLOUD-65425 Block simultaneous edits for Atlassian Companion

However, I also made a feature that would request actual concurrent editing for the documents (merging changes, like in Confluence), or to at least warn the user that someone else is editing the document:

* CONFCLOUD-65595 Implement concurrent editing of documents using Companion App

Please vote on the feature you'd like to see, and you will automatically be added to the list of watchers.

Let me know if you have any questions about this.

Regards,

Shannon