How can I integrate external HTML pages in Confluence?

[Tobias Rapp]

I have some HTML pages generated by a tool from source code that describe APIs for in-house usage. It would be great if I could integrate these HTML pages into Confluence so that users that are logged in to Confluence can see the pages and non-authenticated users cannot.

How can I integrate these external pages? Is it possible with plugins?

Background:

My team tries to replace our current MediaWiki instance with Confluence. In MediaWiki we used a simple Special-Pages plugin to integrate external pages.

The external HTML pages that I try to include are generated by NaturalDocs. See http://www.naturaldocs.org/documentation/html/for an example of how the HTML output is structured (relative links, stylesheets, javascript).

[Matthew J. Horn · Accepted solution]

I did this and blogged about it here:

http://www.confluenza.com/2013/01/04/protect-static-html-pages-using-crowd-and-confluence/

[Davin Studer]

You can use the HTML Include macro for this. You will need to also configure your whitelist (Confluence Admin->Configuration->Configure Whitelist) to allow you to pull in content from the other site.

[Tobias Rapp]

I have tested both the "HTML Include" Macro that comes with Confluence and the "HTML Include Replace" plugin from the marketplace.

The built-in macro has the problem that relative links are not handled properly (see CONF-6567) and the third-party plugin requires the user to already have access to the external HTML pages. But this is why I wanted to integrate the pages in the first place (a catch-22).

[Andy Brook [Plugin People]]

If your tool generated HTML content is not protected, just obscurely served, then would including the content from Confluence, and making the space/page not visible to people who aren't logged in address the visibility?

[Tobias Rapp]

What do you mean with "obscurely served"? Just not mentioning the URL outside of the protected Confluence pages? That would be a bit too weak, I guess.

My current thinking is about writing an Apache auth module for the external HTML pages which connects to the Confluence SQL database backend directly.