Adding a username and password to Confluence RSS feeds

You can create a feed from Confluence, so that you can keep track of updates to Confluence content. You will then use a feed reader to display the feed. Your feed reader may be an RSS newsreader (examples here), or you can display the feed on a Confluence page using the RSS Feed Macro.

Adding your username and password to the feed URL

After creating the feed, you can add your username and password to the feed URL. This will allow your feed reader to log in to Confluence. You will need to add your username and password for feed readers which use the RSS Feed Macro as well as for external RSS newsreaders.

The instructions below apply to feeds coming from Confluence. To log in to external blogs, you will need to know the specific parameters to include in the URL. The terms 'os_username' and 'os_password' are specific to Confluence.

If you are using a newsreader, anyone with access to your RSS newsreader configuration can read your password.
If you are embedding your feed on a Confluence page, you will include your username and password in the text of the page. Your password will be visible to anyone who can edit the page or view the source of the page.

To add a username and password to a Confluence RSS feed,

Get the feed URL by creating a feed from Confluence.
Add one of the two following strings of text to the end of the URL:
1. '?os_username=myname&os_password=mypassword' (i.e. the first character must be '?' if your URL does not yet contain a parameter list starting with '?')
2. '&os_username=myname&os_password=mypassword' (i.e. the first character must be '&' if your URL already contains a parameter list starting with '?')
- Leave out the quotes.
- Replace 'myname' with your username.
- Replace 'mypassword' with your password.
- If your username or password contain special characters, replace with URL encoding as shown below.
- Leave the rest of the text exactly as it is.
Copy the URL into your newsreader or into the Confluence RSS Feed Macro.

Example:
Below is an example of a Confluence feed URL. In the example, the username is 'Firstname Lastname' and the password is 'realpassword'. (Ignore the line-breaks in the example - we added them because the URL is too long to display comfortably on the page.)

Unknown macro: {nomarkup}

Could not retrieve http://confluence.atlassian.com/createrssfeed.action?types=page&types=comment&sort=modified&showContent=true&showDiff=true&spaces=DOC&labelString=&rssType=atom&maxResults=5&timeSpan=5&publicFeed=false&title=Example+Confluence+RSS+Feed+With+Authentication&os_authType=basic&os_username=Firstname+Lastname&os_password=realpassword - Page not permitted.

URL encoding for special characters

If you include special characters in a URL string, you must replace them with special codes, called URL encoding or percent encoding. Below are the codes for some of the most-used characters.

You can find more information here, and a URL translation function here.

Character	URL encoding
space	+
$	%24
<	%3C
>	%3E

Examples:

Your password	String to include
mypassword	&os_password=mypassword
mypassword$	&os_password=mypassword%24
mypassword$2	&os_password=mypassword%242

Child pages

Adding your username and password to the feed URL

URL encoding for special characters

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