This page last changed on Mar 16, 2007 by david.soul@atlassian.com.
JIRA and Confluence were designed to complement each other. We've all seen projects where people try to store all their knowledge in the issue tracker, and we've seen projects where people have suffered trying to track issues in a knowledge management tool. We say: collect your team's thoughts, plans and knowledge in Confluence, track your issues in JIRA, and let the two applications work together to help you get your job done.
Here are four ways you can get JIRA and Confluence working together: use Confluence shortcuts to make easy links to JIRA issues, use trackback for two-way linking between Confluence and JIRA, use macros to include JIRA reports in Confluence pages, and integrate your JIRA and Confluence user management.
Combine Confluence Shortcuts and JIRA Quick Search
The simplest ideas can often be the most useful. In our Confluence site's global configuration - Administration > Shorcut Links, we have the following shortcut defined:

This way, it's simple to create links using Confluence's shortcut notation. Link directly to JIRA issues: CONF-1000, or use JIRA's intuitive quick-search functionality to create links to particular groups of issue: CONF open improvements will link to a list of all open issues in the Confluence project of type "Improvement" (try it and see!)
Use Trackback for easy two-way linking
Activate Trackback in JIRA and Confluence, and if someone makes a link from one application to the other, the link will automatically lead both ways: create a link from a JIRA issue to an example in a Confluence page, and the Confluence page will automatically know to link back to the JIRA issue, and vice versa. This is the perfect way to keep discussion connected to an issue.
- Document your user stories or use-cases in Confluence, and see at a glance which issues affect each use-case.
- If a JIRA issue requires more discussion or thought than can be conveniently held in comments, link them to a Confluence page.
(Note: as of Confluence 1.0 and JIRA 2.6, there is no mechanism for trackback to log in to JIRA or Confluence, so the use of trackback is limited to pages that are visible to anonymous visitors. In a protected Intranet environment, you may wish to open up Anonymous access to JIRA and Confluence to allow trackback to take place. Future revisions of the applications will give you the opportunity to allow Confluence to "log in" to JIRA and vice versa, avoiding this limitation)
Use the {jiraissues} macro to embed JIRA reports into your Confluence site
Any JIRA search-result can be embedded in a Confluence page using the {jiraissues} macro with your choice of included fields and field ordering. This way you can incorporate information from JIRA into the normal flow of your knowledge management. Combined with other macros like {junitreport}, {rss} and {html-include} and the FatCow suite, you can create dashboards in Confluence consolidating information from across your project, with Confluence and JIRA at the centre.
Link to Confluence pages from JIRA issues
While it is possible to simply paste links to Confluence pages into text fields of an issue (e.g. descriptions), the JIRA Linker Plugin provides a custom field that helps you find the correct page.
Integrate JIRA and Confluence user-management
To save you having to enter users into both JIRA and Confluence, you can configure Confluence to use JIRA's user database (this requires that you are using JIRA with an external database, it will not work if you are using JIRA with an embedded HSQL database)
And much more coming...
When you buy a license for JIRA or Confluence, you are automatically entitled to a year of updates. We listen to our customers needs, and having our products complement and work well with each other is very important to us. So if there is any way you think Confluence and JIRA could be made to work better, suggest it in our discussion space, and it may very well end up in a future version.
Is there any news on JIRA and Confluence being able to 'log-in' to one another so that they can trackback and automatically create links to each other yet? We're evaluating the latest version of JIRA Enterprise and Confluence.

Posted by jodrell at Apr 04, 2005 08:28
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I'd like to see trackback working for protected pages as well. Please update us! 

Posted by at Jun 28, 2005 10:00
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How about just creating a hybrid/best of breed that incorporates both jira and confluence, instead of a hack. I think that an integrated 'jira-fluence' would be cool. This way we don't have to use macros or reduce the security constraints... Just an idea... 

Posted by at Jul 05, 2005 12:45
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Is there any way to utilize the project categories and projects in JIRA to produce spaces and pages in Confluence? Can Confluence and JIRA use the same project database? It would be nice to set up a project in JIRA, and have a project space set up in Confluence automatically.

Posted by at Aug 15, 2005 15:13
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There's no way of doing this at the moment.

Posted by tom@atlassian.com at Aug 15, 2005 18:52
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Are there any minimum version requirements for Jira?
I have 3.0.3 and the jiraissues markup does not work.

Posted by at Sep 22, 2005 20:08
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Can you specify "does not work". What does not work? What error message are you getting?

Posted by jens@atlassian.com at Sep 23, 2005 03:10
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As I've dug more into it, it seems to be a permissions problem ... unable to browse the Jira project from within Confluence. I have both running as standalone (since I'm evaluating Confluence)

Posted by at Sep 23, 2005 08:42
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Thanks for the help...I've fixed it.

Posted by at Sep 23, 2005 09:05
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I would really like to see you add trackback for authenticated installations. We have to have people login for various reasons. Is this currently slated for development?

Posted by wdoyle@walkerinfo.com at Nov 10, 2005 20:24
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Is trackback for authenticated users on the horizon? I would be very interested in this feature as well, and you have not replied to the previous comments.

Posted by tblood@edmunds.com at Feb 01, 2006 16:23
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Trackback for installations requiring authentication is currently not on the roadmap for the next release. Please watch the corresponding issue 1 to be updated when we make progress with this issue. Also, if you haven't done so already, please vote for the issue to raise it's priority.
Cheers,
Jens
1 http://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONF-4744

Posted by jens@atlassian.com at Feb 07, 2006 23:24
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Is there an easy way of combining Confluence and Jira together? I.e. I'm looking for "feature A" and get:
Confluence matches:
1
2
...
more
Jira matches:
1
2
...
more
thanks,
Dimitry

Posted by dvoytenko at Mar 10, 2006 18:09
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There are two outstanding feature requests that cover this functionality: CONF-2689, CONF-1436.

Posted by mryall at Mar 15, 2006 18:17
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Could you provide examples of "Combined with other macros like Unknown macro: {junitreport} , Could not retrieve RSS feed: no URL and Unknown macro: {html-include} and the FatCow suite, you can create dashboards in Confluence consolidating information from across your project, with Confluence and JIRA at the centre"?
Or perhaps there are already examples in the Demonstratin Space?
Thank you.

Posted by skeddy at May 04, 2006 04:03
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Hi Shirley,
If you edit a page in Confluence, there is a link to the 'Notation Guide' on the right-hand side. Open this, and under External Content, you can see examples of including Jira content and JUnit results.
I've also set up a sample little dashboard to demonstrate how you might do this in Confluence:
http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/TEST/My+dashboard
Feel free to play around with this.
Regards,
Matt

Posted by mryall at May 15, 2006 02:12
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when I written a shortcut like:
[PRJNAME+open+Tasks@jira], I got a link: http://192.168.0.2:8080/secure/QuickSearch.jspa?searchString=PRJNAME%2Bopen%2BTask , so I can't get any result .
I think the correct link should be:
http://192.168.0.2:8080/secure/QuickSearch.jspa?searchString=PRJNAME+open+Task
Could you tell me how to write the shortcut to get a right link,
Regards
Matt Chen

Posted by chenmin79@gmail.com at Jan 25, 2007 00:27
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btw, confluence 2.2.8, JIRA 3.6.4 standalone

Posted by chenmin79@gmail.com at Jan 25, 2007 00:30
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Hi Chenmin,
Please try the following parameter:
PRJNAME open Tasks
Note that the additional '+' sign is substituted by a 'space' as the browser will interpret it for you. I have tried it both with Firefox and IE and they work perfectly. Please give that a go and let me know how it goes. Thanks.
Regards,
Mei

Posted by meiyan.chan@atlassian.com at Jan 25, 2007 21:20
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A clearer parameter (the above is 'macroed') 
[PRJNAME open Tasks@jira]
Regards,
Mei

Posted by meiyan.chan@atlassian.com at Jan 25, 2007 21:23
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It really works~!
Thank you very much~

Posted by chenmin79@gmail.com at Jan 29, 2007 01:05
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