This is probably my longest standing action item in TERENA : implement a federated version of Confluence.

Below is the recipe for getting this to work with Ubuntu 12.04, Confluence 5.1, Apache, and modmellon.

I choose modmellon because it seemed like a cleaner solution than mod_shib, requiring no additional daemons and much simpler configuration.

Prerequisites

Before you start, make sure you have these bits:

• A SAML Identity Provider (IdP).
• An account on that IdP.
• An attribute that can be used as username in Confluence (for example eduPersonPrincipalName). Attributes for full name and e-mail are optional but recommended.
• The user name of the to-be administrator account. So, if you choose eduPersonPrincipalName as the attribute for username, you need to know your own value (for instance 'dvisser@surfnet.nl'.

Modmellon

Modmellon is an apache module. To get this working I recompiled the Debian source packages from the University of Tilburg for Ubuntu 12.04 and made them available in our own APT repository.

Once that is done, the needed packages can be installed:

apt-get install apache2-mpm-worker libapache2-mod-auth-mellon 

Create a directory /etc/apache/mellon, and store the Identity Provider metadata in XML format to a file called idp.xml.

openssl req -new -newkey rsa:2048 -days 3650 -nodes -x509 -keyout core.key -out core.crt

Create a 

• sp.crt - X509 certificate
• sp.key 

PostgreSQL

apt-get install postgresql

Create a dedicated database user, and a database:

sudo su - postgres
createuser -S -d -r -P -E confuser
createdb -O confuser confluence

Confluence 

Install OpenJDK:

apt-get --no-install-recommends install openjdk-7-jdk

Download the source http://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/downloads/binary/atlassian-confluence-5.1.tar.gz and unpack it to /opt/confluence.

Edit /opt/confluence/conflue

Once installed, use this upstart script to have start on boot:

# Upstart script for confluence
description     "Atlassian Confluence"
start on runlevel [2345]
stop on runlevel [!2345]
kill timeout 30
env RUN_AS_USER=root
env BASEDIR=/opt/confluence
script
    LOGFILE=$BASEDIR/logs/catalina.out
    exec su - $RUN_AS_USER -c "$BASEDIR/bin/catalina.sh run" >> $LOGFILE 2>&1
end script

Once this is there, you can simply issue "start confluence", "stop confluence", "restart confluence".