Confluence Hooks for Bitbucket

What is the Confluence for Bitbucket add-on?

The add-on "Confluence for Bitbucket" aims to map and enforce a workflow between Confluence and Bitbucket. Documentation (e.g. release notes, concepts, etc.) must be created at a certain point in the development process. "Confluence for Bitbucket" ensures that code changes are made at the right time and do not bypass your process. Especially from the point of view of development process or also from the point of view of certification bodies, many documents are necessary regarding software development and the quality assurance. It must be ensured that documents are not only available, but also be lived and integrated into the workflow. For example, "software design documents" are necessary or the "change control board" must be documented before the development of a new feature can begin. What about test or review reports? Equally important are test reports or review reports, which must be documented before a new feature or bugfix will be integrated into a target branch.

These are just a few examples where it may make sense for Bitbucket to interact with Confluence. In your company, respectively in your "Development Guidelines" you will certainly find further meaningful rules in which it makes sense to compare the software development with corresponding documents.

It is exactly this interaction that Confluence Hooks takes care of for you. If documents do not exist or simply have the wrong attributes, this add-on can prevent a code change. A push or a merge is rejected and reference is made to missing or incorrect documentation. With each push and with each merge the add-on compares whether your documentation guidelines are fulfilled.

Add-on Setup

Because the add-on will check if a valid Confluence page exists, an application link must exist between Bitbucket and Confluence. Please follow the steps below to create a application link.

1	In the Bitbucket "Administration" menu, select Application links
2	If no valid link exists, you have to create a new one using the Create new link button
3	You should be adminstrator in Confluence. Depending on your user management you can confirm that both instances have the same users or not (If unsure leave it unchecked) The Continue Button will start the creation of the application link and will redirect you to the Confluence instance you have entered.
4	In Confluence you can now confirm the application link. Please press the Continue button and you will be redirected to Bitbucket.
5	After the redirection to Bitbucket has been done, you will see a connected a Confluence instance in you application link list.
6	Finally you can check the authentication settings of the application link, via pressing the pen button. By default OAuth should be selected, which is correct

Hook Configuration & Hands-on Example

In the next sections we will explain the possibilities of the hook and illustrate the configuration in several steps with a hands-on example. Together we will configure the hook step by step and perform a code change with you to show the effects of the hook.

Where you can find the hook configuration?

Step 1: The configuration of the hook you will find in the administration area of your project or repository
Step 2: You can now find the configuration under the standard place for hook
- Hooks if you would like to configure push check
- Merge Checks if you would like to configure to configure merge checks
Step 3: Open the Confluence Hooks configuration

How can I configure the hook?

The hook evaluates whether a specific Confluence page exists for a code change or a branch. To better identify this Confluence page, an issue key can also be used, which is found in a commit message. Thus it is possible to capture the issue key from a commit message and use this information when searching for a specific page. More about this in the following sections. To capture this issue key a regular expression is used, which can be configured via the field Issue-key regular expression (see screenshot). Of course, you don't need an issue key to search for a Confluence Page. But usually it makes not much sense to do this, because an issue key is an important factor to identify a corresponding page for a code change, because an issue key is representative for a code change. And normally you are looking for pages which have a direct relation to a code change. But maybe there are commits in your workflow which do not contain issue keys. These issue keys can be excluded from further evaluation. For this you can select the following option. If this is the case, all further rules (which will be configured afterwards) will not be evaluated if no issue key was found. Normally, you do not need to change anything in these settings and can proceed directly to step 4.

The validity of the issue is not checked. The issue key is used exclusively in the fields of a rule. If you want to check the validity of the issue key, please use the Jira Hooks for Bitbucket add-on.

Step 4 - Add Rule: Confluence rules can be added using the "Add new rule" button. Any number of rules can be defined. For a valid hook configuration at least one rule has to be added.

Step 5 Possibilities to configure a rule

A rule aims to find one or more Confluence pages and evaluate this page against the configuration. As soon the configuration is violated, a push or merge is rejected. Since a check is always performed based on a code change, the properties of a code change should also be able to be used for a search. Therefore, different information is available as keywords to be able to use them in the further rule configuration.

Keywords:

%key% - Represents an issue key which was found.
%branch% - Represents the branch name where the changes were made.
%hash% - Identifies a hash in which e.g. an issue key was found

The keyword can be used in any option, even in error or hint fields. Before a rule is evaluated, the keywords are automatically replaced with the appropriate values

A rule is evaluated for each issue key found and for each branch found. So if 3 different issue keys are pushed in one or more commit messages, then each rule is checked for each issue key and each branch. So in this example the rules are checked 4 times (3 issue keys + 1 branch).

Rule Options

To follow our hands-on example the following options are now occupied. You will find a short description of the options as well as snippets, which you can copy directly into the respective options.

Title: The title of the rule. If an evaluation of the rule results in an error, this text is printed to the developer. This text is the core message in error situations. For a valid configuration, the field must not be empty
```
Software design document is needed
```
CQL rule: The CQL rule identifies all Confluence Pages that should be checked. The possibilities how to formulate a CQL can be found in the official Atlassian Documentation Advanced Searching using CQL. Additionally it can be specified what will happen, if no Confluence Page has been detected with this CQL. If it makes sense, the rule can be skipped, if no Confluence page has been detected. In this case this rule will not be evaluated. For a valid configuration the field must not be empty, the keyword %key% and/or %branch% must be present and of course the CQL query must be valid.
```
label = "%key%" and label = "chfb-demonstration" and label = "design-document"
```
Based on this CQL now all sides are selected, which have the following labels
design-document - e.g. the label which identifies your design documents
issue-key - so that the correct design document is identified for your code change
chfb-demonstration - a unique label to uniquely identify pages for the participation example

Like count: With the "Like count" you can define how many Likes a page must have at least. If this option is used, a push or a merge will be rejected if the "Like count" is smaller than the specified value. However, it can be defined whether each page found must meet this "like count" or only one page.
```
1
// select all pages must have the given like count
```
Page properties: With the option "Page Properties" the properties of a Confluence page can be evaluated, based on the Page Properties Macro. It can be checked if a page property value is exactly correct or if a value contains a string or if a value is not empty. The syntax is quite simple and consists of key-value pairs, which are connected with a comparator. The evaluation is not case-sensitive. Of course, several page properties can also be evaluated. This can be done by specifying multiple key-value pairs. In this case the key-value pairs are separated with a new line. In the case of multiple key-value pairs, it can also be defined whether only one entry has to fit for a page or all entries have to fit.
There are the comparison operators available:
'=' - The specified value must correspond exactly to the value of the page. (status=approved)
'~' - The specified value must be included in the value of the page. (issue-keys~DEM-1)
'+' - The value of the page must not be empty (tester+) (value is not needed in this case)
```
status=Approved
reviewer+
// select all pages must match the properties
// select all key pairs must match
```
Based on these settings, the selected pages must have a page properties macro. This macro must contain a table with the "Status" field having the value "Approved" and the "Reviewer" field with some user.

Error Message: The exact error message of the rule. This error message will be reported to a developer, if the evaluation of the rule leads to an error. The field must not be empty for a valid configuration.
```
No valid software design document has been found for the given code change (issue: %key%)
```
Hint: This message will be printed to the developer also. The message should be a hint. The message should contain instructions about how to correct the issue. The field must not be empty for a valid configuration.
```
Please create a software design document for the issue %key% and please ask your team lead to approve the design document.
```

Steps 7 - 11 Create a Confluence Page

Open the Confluence instance you configured as an application link and create a Confluence page in any space. Of course, the user you use in Bitbucket should have read permissions on this page via the application link.

	Step - 7: Create a Confluence page as usual via the Create Button
	Step 8: You can choose any page name, because the page selection in our example is done via labels only. Step 9: In order to evaluate the page properties, a Confluence page must also contain a page properties macro. Therefore the macro is added in this step
	Step 10: You do not necessarily have to enter further details with the macro - Just press insert
	Step 11: Now you can add a table to the Page Property macro that represents the keys and values of the page. Step 11.1: In our example we change the table header from hoizintal to vertical. Step 11.2: We add the properties Designer, Status and Reviewer Step 11.3: For the Status we use the macro Status
	Step 12: Because the page selection in our example is done via labels only, we have to add 3 labels to the page test-1 design-document chfb-demonstration
	The final page should be like this It is intended that the page will not get any likes yet

Steps 13-20 - Git clone - commit - push

Now that we have created the hook and created a Confluence page for the test, we are ready to execute the test using Git commands. We will now clone the Git repository where we have configured the hook, make a change, commit the change with the issue key "TEST-1" and push it afterwards. Since the page has not received any likes yet, we expect the push to fail.

Execute the following commands (e.g. in your /tmp directory)

Step-13: Clone your git Repository

Clone repository

BASH

git clone http://admin@bitbucket-server/scm/project_1/rep_1.git

Step 14 - Got into the repository
Change directory

BASH
```
cd rep_1   
```

Step 15 - Create a file, add file, commit file with the issue key TEST-1

Modify file and commit the file

BASH

echo "test-string" >>  test1.txt                               
git add test1.txt                                              
git commit -m "TEST-1 anything"

Step 16 - Push the changes
Git push

BASH
```
git push                                                       
```
As you can see, the change could not be pushed. The correct page was selected based on our CQL, the status and reviewer were successfully evaluated, but no like could be found.

Step 17 - Edit the Confluence page - set the status of the page to OPEN

Now the push should fail because the status of the document does not match APPROVED and the page still has no likes.
Step 18 - Push again
Git push

BASH
```
git push                                                       
```
As you can see, the change could not be pushed. Because of the wrong status and the missing like

Step 18 - Lets change the Confluence page again (Add a like and set the correct status)

Step 19 - PUSH AGAIN

Now the push works...
Last Step

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