Automating Confluence Posts with Amazon Cloud (AWS)

- 7 mins
field notes automation cloud python english

How do you automate a job without setting up a dedicated machine?

Some mundane tasks can easily be automated. In my case, I needed something that could post to our Confluence instance at a specific time every week. This is because we use blog posts in Confluence for announcing our weekly volunteer meetings and as a simple attendance management.

Posting via Confluence REST API

Confluence, a team collaboration software written in Java and quite often used in corporate environments, offers a REST API that makes it possible to perform many operations on the content. In this case, I was interested in posting new content with some text, and I was getting tired of doing that manually every week. So, I thought: “I spend a lot of time on this task. I should write a program automating it!”.

The first take on that problem was a simple Python script:

import json
import requests

url = "https://some-confluence-url.com/rest/api/content/"
headers = { "content-type": "application/json" }
payload = { "type": "blogpost",
            "title": "Fancy meeting title",
            "space": {
                "key": "mySpaceNameGoesHere"
            },
            "body": {
                "storage": {
                    "representation": "storage",
                    "value": "Meeting description goes here."
                }
            }
            #"history": {
            #    "createdDate": '2017-01-10T14:00:00.000Z'
            #},

        }

response = requests.post(url, 
                         data=json.dumps(payload), 
                         headers=headers, 
                         auth=("myUserName", "mySecretPassword"))
print json.dumps(response.json(), indent=4, sort_keys=True)

You should be able to run this script against your end-point and post your content. Just note that I used requests library here that needs to be installed separately, for instance, by using pip:

sudo pip install requests

Also, you will need to update the following values in the script:

The script uses basic authentication to post the content and, if successful, returns metadata about the post as a response. If it fails, the response from Confluence end-point should point you in the right direction.

Creating a Lambda Function in AWS

Now we are one step closer to automation. The script works, and we can post content with a simple push of a button. What now?

Well, now I needed something to run that script and something to trigger that action. The trigger is the time as I wanted to run our script weekly, but first I needed to deploy our script to the Cloud. Scheduling and triggers would come later.

Since we had some infrastructure on AWS already, I decided to deploy the script on the same platform. I wanted to deploy it as a simple stand-alone function in the Cloud – in AWS world it is called a Lambda function.

I started by wrapping our code into a function and making it AWS Lambda function compatible – to define a function that takes two arguments: event and context. I choose to call the function blogpost_handler:

#!/usr/bin/python
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

# File name: poster.py

import requests
import json
import datetime

def blogpost_handler(event, context): 

    # Script is run on Sunday, need to use date for Tuesday
    next_tue = (datetime.datetime.now()
                    +datetime.timedelta(days=2)).strftime("%Y-%m-%d")

    url = "https://some-confluence-url.com/rest/api/content/"
    headers = { "content-type": "application/json" }
    payload = { "type": "blogpost",
                "title": "Meeting: "+next_tue,
                "space": {
                    "key": "mySpaceNameGoesHere"
                },
                "body": {
                    "storage": {
                        "representation": "storage",
                        "value": "Meeting description goes here."
                    }
                }
            }

    
    response = requests.post(url, 
                             data=json.dumps(payload), 
                             headers=headers, 
                             auth=("myUserName", "mySecretPassword"))
    
    print json.dumps(response.json(), indent=4, sort_keys=True)

    return response.json()

Now, I needed to package the code to make it ready to deploy:

# 1. create folder
mkdir blogposter
cd blogposter

# 2. create and copy the code above into poster.py
touch poster.py

# 3. install requests package locally
pip install requests -t .

# 4. zip contents of the folder and create a zip file in a parent directory
zip -r9 ../pyposter.zip *

And we are ready to deploy to AWS! Start with creating a new Lambda Function and selecting a blank function for this job.

Start with selecting a blueprint

I didn’t choose any triggers for now and continued to the configuration page. When presented with function configuration you need to give it a name, description, runtime, and a .zip file with the code. At the end, you will need to define a handler (which will typically be filename.function_name), and a role.

Fill out the rest of info

At the end of the wizard, you can run it manually by pressing the Test button. If you did all the steps above, this should now create a new post on your Confluence. Congratulations, you have now set up a stand-alone function in the Cloud!

Schedule it!

Now that I have automated the task and deployed it to the Cloud, I needed something to trigger that function. In this case, I wanted to schedule it to run weekly, so function was set to be triggered by the CloudWatch events. It offers a good support for scheduling Lambda expressions.

I defined event source as a cron expression, and a target as a Lambda function I created in the previous step.

# 9:05, every Sunday
5 9 ? * 1 *

Adding a scheduled event

Now you (and I) have a function that is scheduled to run weekly and does not require a dedicated machine to run. It also has some good options for logging and sending alarms in case it fails.

Related Posts

Rustam Mehmandarov

Rustam Mehmandarov

Passionate Computer Scientist