How to grant anonymous access only to a single PAGE in Confluence?
Asked by Matt Holmes:

Our development team is using Confluence for release notes, bugs, and other documented changes. For some of these pages we want to be able to send an URL to people outside the company without having them log in to see them. We do not want to open the entire space to anonymous, for obvious reasons, and if we have to add a username/login that changes how we interact with those who are gaining access.

Short of creating an entirely seperate space for "public documents" and re-creating the individual hierarchies of our Confluence spaces, I can't figure out how to simply grant access to a single page to anonymous.

Is there any way of doing this? Is there some other way of achieving this goal?

Thanks in advance!


Answers:
author: Gorka Puente _Appfire_
body: Hi @Matt Holmes,

We've just released the new version of [Share It (former Share Attachments and Pages](https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/com.keinoby.confluence.plugins.share-attachments)), which allows you send individual pages without giving access to the rest of your Confluence instance.

Check it out and send us feedback!

Cheers,

Gorka


author: Stuart French
body: I have to say, even for normal users (not anonymous) this is a terrible solution.

For a space with a thousand of pages, I have to grant full access and then restrict 999 of them. Really???

You other option, drag the page out of it's natural position so anonymous can see it. Not good either. both rely on power users of the space always remembering to do the right thing in the future, long after this change was made or risk a security breach.

The ability to allow a single user access to or editing ability of a single page (ie: granted rights instead of just restrictive rights) would be a great option moving forward.

comments: author: Kyle Harrison
body: +1 for this. Has a JIRA been raised for this feature?


author: Leos Leos
body: +1. We want to share release related information to anyone with confluence access but the space has restrictions for view. So we could either grant access to space to everyone and then set permissions for every other page or move this part to different space :-(


author: Gorka Puente _Appfire_
body: Hi Leos,Our add-on Share it allows you to share only one page without giving access to the remaining pages on the space<https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/com.keinoby.confluence.plugins.share-attachments>Give it a try a let me know what do you think.Cheers,Gorka


author: Antony Quinn
body: Unfortunately, this doesn't help me as we use Cloud Confluence and your solution looks to be server only ![sad](/html/@C495B4504065515364EB1894F812B34C/images/emoticons/sad.png "sad")


author: Gorka Puente _Appfire_
body: Hi Antony. Yes, our solution is currently server. However, we have an internal feature request to move it to cloud. If we see that there's a high demand, we'll think of including it in our roadmap. So please, contact us through <https://comalatech.zendesk.com/> and we'll include you in the internal feature request.


author: Amalia
body: Confluence has a 3-level of permissions: Global, Space, and Page. In order for anonymous users to view a page, they need to have a VIEW permission in the space level. Page restrictions are unique, in a way that, if a page has its 'View' restriction set, that restriction will be inherited by all its children (and their children, and so on).

One option to grant anonymous access is to create a root page with 2 children page: Page A and Page B. Page A is only accessible by registered users. this includes its children pages. Page B can be accessible by anyone including anonymous users. All children pages of Page B are automatically set to be viewed by anonymous, since the restrictions are not applied for Page B.

More info: <https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DOC/Page+Restrictions>

comments: author: Matt Holmes
body: Thank you for your reply!

This is what I figured, however my concern is with multiple contributors to Confluence, it's possible someone will forget to take the extra step to "restrict view to Confluence-Users" and leave confidential information open to the internet. Is there a way to set the default for all spaces and pages to restrict view to confluence-users so that there has to be a manual decision to remove that restriction?


author: Matt Holmes
body: I misunderstood this until I tested it out. Because page restrictions are solely based on authenticated users/groups, there's no way to easily manage anonymous access. If I set restrictions to confluence-users for ALL spaces, no page will ever be accessable by anonymous users - because I can't set page restrictions permissions on a per-page basis (aka have them NOT inherit permissions.) Any thoughts on what we could do to allow access in this way?

I was thinking of maybe setting up a user that's blank, or something like "publicuser" with no password, but that makes all of my admin molicules sting with pain.


author: fcukinyahoo
body: Go to

Browse -\> Confluence Admin -\> Global Permissions -\> "Enable Anonymous Access"

then under the Global Permissions Link click,

Space Permissions -\> "Manage Permissions" (on the space that you wanna give access to) -\> "Anonymous Users" Edit Permissions -\> Click the check box under "View"

That enables everybody to View (only) for the spaces that you chose.

Then you can edit each page individually to give access to view or not.

comments: author: Matt Holmes
body: Thank you for your reply!

This is what I figured, however my concern is with multiple contributors to Confluence, it's possible someone will forget to take the extra step to "restrict view to Confluence-Users" and leave confidential information open to the internet. Is there a way to set the default for all spaces and pages to restrict view to confluence-users so that there has to be a manual decision to remove that restriction?


author: Matt Holmes
body: I misunderstood this until I tested it out. Because page restrictions are solely based on authenticated users/groups, there's no way to easily manage anonymous access. If I set restrictions to confluence-users for ALL spaces, no page will ever be accessable by anonymous users - because I can't set page restrictions permissions on a per-page basis (aka have them NOT inherit permissions.) Any thoughts on what we could do to allow access in this way?

I was thinking of maybe setting up a user that's blank, or something like "publicuser" with no password, but that makes all of my admin molicules sting with pain.


author: Smita Ninad Kelkar
body: wish to know when we say Anonymous , does the user still have to be confluence user . in the sense , if I have licensed 100 users which are my Active directory users and I wish to permit another 10 in the intranet to see some pages .. can we do that, how?


author: Hailin Zhang
body: Here is the master page of this request: <https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONF-7089>


author: Zolt?n Leh?czky
body: Exactly this is sadly not possible, but opened issue: <https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONF-37884>


author: RianA
body: It's a little hard to achieve that. But you can set the whole space to anonymous access, and restrict other pages except this page, and this page will have anonymous access.

comments: author: Matt Holmes
body: Thank you for your reply!

This is what I figured, however my concern is with multiple contributors to Confluence, it's possible someone will forget to take the extra step to "restrict view to Confluence-Users" and leave confidential information open to the internet. Is there a way to set the default for all spaces and pages to restrict view to confluence-users so that there has to be a manual decision to remove that restriction?


author: Matt Holmes
body: I misunderstood this until I tested it out. Because page restrictions are solely based on authenticated users/groups, there's no way to easily manage anonymous access. If I set restrictions to confluence-users for ALL spaces, no page will ever be accessable by anonymous users - because I can't set page restrictions permissions on a per-page basis (aka have them NOT inherit permissions.) Any thoughts on what we could do to allow access in this way?

I was thinking of maybe setting up a user that's blank, or something like "publicuser" with no password, but that makes all of my admin molicules sting with pain.