Issues when changing Confluence context path - ideas needed

[Alex Michael]

We've been running Confluence and JIRA on the same server for a while now, and have finally decided that it's time to change the context path for one of the two (probably Confluence) to prevent the "session cookie logout" issue users are facing.

Up until now this hasn't been a big issue, as most JIRA and Confluence users did not overlap (even though everyone has accounts in both), but we now have much tighter integration between the two, with tickets in JIRA referencing Confluence pages and pages in Confluence referencing JIRA tickets etc.

The decision is to (probably) change the context path for confluence to "/confluence", so users will access http://w.x.y.z:8080 for JIRA and http://w.x.y.z:8070/confluence for Confluence. However the problem in doing this is that all of the existing links to Confluence pages in JIRA issues (comments, descriptions) will break.

Is there a way to implement one of the following?

• Bulk edit (perhaps in SQL) of JIRA issues to rename the paths to include the new "confluence" path
• Set up redirection so http://w.x.y.z:8070/SPACE/Page+Name gets redirected to http://w.x.y.z:8070/confluence/SPACE/Page+Name
• Any other workaround that can be suggested? ;)

We have a UAT environment that I'd be testing changes in first, so I'm not worried about experimenting with different options before we implement this change in our PROD setup.

Any help would be appreciated!

Thanks

-Alex

[JamieA · Accepted solution]

Definitely avoid the bulk edit and definitely do the redirect. Not only will jira issues be pointing to confluence, a lot of people will have bookmarks and links in emails and word docs etc.

IMHO you should probably do this with apache, using mod_rewrite and mod_proxy (there are examples in the confluence docs).

Alternatively you could probably do it just by editing web-inf/urlrewrite.xml - docs here: http://urlrewritefilter.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/src/doc/manual/3.2/index.html

[Alex Michael]

Jamie,

You make a good point about emails and other links to confluence, I didn't think of that!

Apache is a bit too much work for us right now - though we're considering migrating both JIRA and Confluence to new hardware (same IP), so when we do that we might include Apache and mod_rewrite etc at the time.

I'll have a go at the urlrewrite.xml you mentioned, that seems to be the simplest solution right now.

Thanks for your help!

-Alex