Automating Confluence Page Status at Scale: A Practical Workaround
I recently faced a challenge that many large organizations run into when scaling their use of Atlassian Confluence.
I needed to create an automation that would automatically change the page status under specific conditions—for every page created or updated across more than 600 spaces.
The problem
Out of the box, Confluence provides a native way to manage page statuses. However, there’s a limitation: native page status automation cannot be applied globally across spaces. This becomes a blocker in enterprise environments where consistency and governance are key.
The solution
Since the native functionality didn’t meet the requirement, I designed a custom automation logic using Confluence Automation combined with REST API calls.
Below is a step-by-step guide to replicate this solution.
Prerequisites
Before starting, make sure:
- You are using one of the default page statuses (custom statuses won’t work with this approach, if not cerated in each space you need to cover)
- The “Suggest statuses” feature is enabled
→ Go to: Space Settings → General → Avatar and Status
Implementation
1. Create a New Automation Rule
- Go to Automation and create a new rule from scratch
- Select trigger: “Page published”
2. (Optional) Exclude Personal Spaces
If you want to avoid running this automation in personal spaces:
- Add an “If” block
- Condition:
{{space.isPersonal}} equals false
3. Retrieve Available Page Statuses
- Add a “Send web request” action
- Configure it to call the Confluence API endpoint that returns available page statuses
- Endpoint:
https://your-domain.atlassian.net/wiki/rest/api/content/{{pageId}}/state/available - Method:
GET - Do not forget to flag the Delay execution of subsequent rule actions until we’ve received a response for this web request option
- Add the correct Authorization header to your request
- Endpoint:
4. Store Statuses in a Variable
Add a “Create variable” action:
Name: statuses
Value: {{webResponse.body.spaceContentStates}}
5. Loop Through the Statuses
- Add an Advanced Branch / Loop
- Use this smart value:
{{statuses.split("}, ")}}
6. Identify the Desired Status
Inside the loop:
- Add an If condition
- Check:
{{status}} contains name=<desired status>
7. Extract the Status ID
Add a Create variable action:
Name: id
Value: {{status.substringBetween("{id=",", color=")}}
8. Update the Page Status via API
Add another Send web request action:
- Endpoint:
https://your-domain.atlassian.net/wiki/rest/api/content/{{pageId}}/state?status=current - Method:
PUT - Add the correct Authorization header to your request
- Body:
{
"id": "{{id}}"
}
With this automation in place:
- Every time a new page is published, the rule triggers automatically
- It retrieves available statuses dynamically
- Identifies the correct one (e.g., “In progress”)
- Applies it to the page
- Publishes a new version with the updated status
While native Confluence automation is powerful, it often falls short at enterprise scale, but by combining automation rules with REST API calls you can unlock much more advanced and flexible capabilities, creating reusable solutions that help enforce consistency and governance across large environments.
Valentina Da Rold
Author
