External access to Confluence on-demand pages per link but avoid login and anonymous access

[Ludwig Bayerl]

We are creating a web application and we want to maintain the documentation in Confluence for it (as it's a great tool).

So to keep it simple we currently have small help icons with a simple <a href="TINY_CONFLUENCE_LINK"> which  opens Confluence via tiny URLs.in a new window - voilá, integrated documentation!

To achieve that we currently use the anonymous access fully restricted to 'readonly'.

Nevertheless this means in a cloud situation that everyone can visit the documentation who is aware of the link.

So we thought of using one dedicated user (= one of our paid accounts) which we would name 'readonly' or something like that.

This isn't as well not hard to achieve, BUT:

How can we manage that user 'readonly' doesn't need to login first when clicking on our link but we do that already in the background (so our frontend or backend is logging in for user 'readonly').

Is there any way to achieve that?

[Rob Woodgate]

A user has to have a username and password unless they are anonymous.  If you're using Confluence OnDemand (Confluence Cloud) then you won't be able to bypass this programmatically.  If you need a logged in user, you'll have to use a hosted or self-hosted instance and do some hacking behind the scenes.

To avoid this problem, you could add "Anonymous" to a group, and only give that group access to see the documentation for the web application you're creating (https://confluence.atlassian.com/cloud/manage-groups-744721627.html). Other people could still see this documentation if they knew the URL, but it would be documentation that you're happy for users to see anyway.