Search Confluence or Jira with Raycast

Source: Dev.to

Preface

If you’ve used Alfred but haven’t tried Raycast yet, it’s worth a shot. The free plan is more than enough for day‑to‑day use (see Raycast vs Alfred).

Free users can’t use Raycast’s built‑in data sync, but you can still sync via Raycast’s Export/Import Settings & Data plus iCloud Drive.

Background

At our company we use Atlassian’s Confluence and Jira for our knowledge base and project management.

We frequently open Wiki and Jira pages to look things up. To find a specific article or issue, it often takes several steps:

1. Open the website
2. Focus the search box
3. Type the query
4. Filter the results

A slightly faster way is to bookmark commonly used links, or create Raycast Quicklinks plus Aliases for quick access.

Quicklinks are great in some scenarios—for example, searching documentation with

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/search?q={Query}

where {Query} is a dynamic parameter (i.e., what you want to search for). Any site that supports URL‑based search parameters can use this approach—for instance, Google’s

https://www.google.com/search?q={Query}

However, this kind of search doesn’t work for internal company Wiki/Jira sites, and using Quicklinks for internal doc searching isn’t ideal. Over time the number of links you need to visit or save only keeps growing—whether they’re browser bookmarks or Quicklinks.

That led to the idea of building a Raycast extension to support fast search (and a few simple actions) for Confluence and Jira. Conveniently, our self‑hosted (Data Center) deployment also supports authentication via Personal Access Tokens, which is a secure way to integrate with external programs. Learn more

Before You Start

After installing Raycast, go to the Raycast Store and install the Atlassian Data Center (Self‑Hosted) extension.

When you run commands from this extension, it will guide you through some initial setup. Prepare the following:

• Confluence Base URL – e.g. https://confluence.example.com/
• Confluence PAT – go to your company’s Confluence site → Profile (avatar) → Personal Access Tokens → Create token (keep the token safe; if it leaks, revoke it immediately)
• Jira Base URL – e.g. https://jira.example.com/
• Jira PAT – create it the same way as Confluence

Tip: Since the fields above are required, if you only use one of them you can fill the other with any non‑empty value.

Usage Guide

Tip: You can also set an Alias for each command based on your own habits for quicker access.

Available Commands

Confluence

• Search Contents – Search pages (articles), blog posts, attachments, and comments; supports favoriting
• Search Spaces – Search spaces
• Search Users – Search users

Jira

• Search Issues – Search issues; supports a few simple actions such as transitioning issue status and creating worklogs
• Board View – View boards, such as the current Active Sprint
• Worklog View – View your worklogs
• Notification View – View notifications (if there are “unread” messages, the Search Issues list will also show a hint)
• Manage Fields – Helps Search Issues display more information in search results

Filters (included in each search panel)

Search Contents

• All Contents
• Full Text Search – Expand the search scope from title ~ "xxx" to text ~ "xxx"
• Viewed Recently
• Updated Recently
• Created by Me
• Contributed by Me
• Mention Me
• My Favourites
• Watched by Me

Search Issues

• All Issues
• Full Text Search – Expand the search scope from summary ~ "xxx" to text ~ "xxx"
• Open Issues
• My Open Issues
• Assigned to Me
• Reported by Me
• Created Recently
• Updated Recently
• Resolved Recently
• Viewed Recently
• Watched by Me

As mentioned earlier, Quicklinks tend to grow endlessly over time. Favoriting articles is a good alternative (the Action Panel provides quick Favorite/Unfavorite actions). When searching, just switch to the My Favourites option.

Advanced Queries

You can also type full CQL or JQL for customized advanced queries:

• Confluence Query Language (CQL)
• Jira Query Language (JQL)

Managing Custom Fields (Jira)

Since Jira allows custom fields—and each instance can differ a lot—the Manage Fields command helps Search Issues show more information.

1. Open Manage Fields.
2. Search for the field you want (e.g., Test Engineer).
3. Click Add to Search.

The selected field will now appear in the Search Issues list.

Screenshots

Because Raycast List has limited space, lots of additional information can only be hidden in tooltips.
You can reveal it by moving the cursor over icons, titles, subtitles, timestamps, avatars, and so on.

Confluence

Jira

More screenshots

Others

Some Raycast extensions I personally use. They may not be for everyone—pick what you need:

• Lark Documents – Search Lark docs
• Cursor – Commonly used: Search Recent Projects
• DeepWiki – Great for Q&A to quickly understand internal implementations of some libraries