How to automate Content indexing in confluence server

[Moses Thomas]

1.  I will  like to  trigger content indexing  every  morning via a script  do we have rest  api  to  do  this via the curl command ?

Thanks,

Moses

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted solution]

There's an obvious question - why do you want to do this?

Confluence does not need to be re-indexed regularly, pages are indexed automatically.  Needing to re-index is indicative of a significant change or a problem with the data.  So what have you done to it that makes it seem like it needs doing every morning?

[Moses Thomas · Accepted solution]

Hello Nic,

My confluence is  working fine,  but to  be on  safe side with  search  content in confluence i  would like to  perform  it time to  time so  do  we have a possibility  like in Jira or not ?

Br

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

It's the same as Jira - run an external script that triggers it.

Complete waste of time though.  Indexing in Jira is only needed if something goes wrong or for some config changes.  Same goes for Confluence - it's pointless re-indexing a working system.  In fact, it's worse, because searches stop working during a re-index.

[Moses Thomas]

Hello Nic,

It is not pointless to re-index in confluence(search indexing also called content indexing) at  least once a  month,  sometimes i  have problem  with searching for users  in confluence even though  user in  available in directory when i  want to add  permission to user in  a page,  but when i  do  content indexing user appears

I have search  for rest api  to  trigger indexing automatically i cannot find,  do  you  know where to  find the rest API ?

Best regards,

Moses

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

If you think you need to re-index regularly, then that tells me you have a problem with the indexing that you need to fix, not just hide by regularly rebuilding.

You need to look into why your users can't be found, as you have a broken setup somewhere.

[Moses Thomas]

So tell  me exactly  what  content  indexing( search indexing ) is doing exactly

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

The Confluence database is built as a datastore for your pages.  It is not designed for search. 

Imagine the basics - a page.  That's some metadata in a table, plus a big block of content.  Searching for a word in that sort of table is quite slow and intensive.

So, there is a fast, local index built in the application.  The data is organised differently - for pages for example, there's a pile of word-stems pointing to pages.

Every create or edit to a page updates the index.  In a healthy system, that means the index will be up to date and correct at all times. 

(It indexes other things too, but you get the gist from just the page stuff above)

"I need to re-index regularly" is a symptom of something breaking the index.  You've said you have problems looking for users.  That implies something is wrong in the user directory setup.