Cuckoo: A Custom Confluence Importer for Outline

The knowledgebase Outline is a possible open-source alternative to the well-known Atlassian product Confluence. With Atlassian discontinuing their Data Center products, alternatives for self-hosted knowledgebases are needed. Outline does indeed have an importer for Confluence workspaces, however it is exclusive to the paid cloud version.

To enable teams to migrate from Confluence with a self-hosted Outline instance, this program aims to provide an alternative to Outline's own Confluence importer.

Tested with Confluence 9.2.4 and Outline 0.87.3 on a Linux host.

No AI was used in the creation of this program.

How to use Cuckoo

1. Download Cuckoo from the Releases
2. Using pip, install the requirements in requirements.txt
3. Create a file named .env. This is best done by copying sample.env and adjusting the values to your needs
4. Export desired spaces from your Confluence instance as HTML
5. If you want to have Outline user mentions instead of links to Confluence profiles, create a JSON file mapping the IDs.
   For the exact format see users.sample.json.
   Furthermore, set USER_MAPPING to the path of your mapping.
6. Run python import.py <export_zip_1> <export_zip_2> ... <export_zip_n>
   Cuckoo will handle all of the files.
7. Be mindful of API rate limits: If the script runs into the rate limit, it aborts. This is subject to change.

Known Issues

• User profile pictures are not kept. This is intentional: Due to how they're stored, this would need a separate implementation for these attachments.
  While keeping them intact is possible, I opted for the simpler solution (for now) to get the main content converted quickly.
• Images don't work as link anchors. I didn't find an option to make an image a hyperlink in the editor, so I'm assuming Outline to be incapable of using something other than text as anchor.
  This hypothesis is further supported by the fact that the JSON generated by Outline achieves links by marking the text.