First app created using confluence

🌟 About the Project

💡 Inspiration

As someone exploring the Atlassian ecosystem for the first time, I was curious to see how custom apps could enhance the Confluence experience. The idea of building something lightweight, serverless, and cloud-native was very appealing—especially with Forge, Atlassian's developer platform designed to simplify that journey. FirstConfluenceApp started as a "Hello World" test but quickly evolved into a more meaningful learning experience.

🚀 What it does

This app is built as a Confluence spacePage module using Forge Custom UI. It retrieves and displays the following:

The logged-in user's current theme (light/dark)
The user's account ID from Confluence context
The user's public display name using Confluence's Bulk User Lookup API

This small, clean app serves as a foundation for learning context-aware, API-driven Forge apps.

🏗️ How we built it

Forge CLI was used to scaffold the app and deploy changes quickly
The app runs in a Custom UI frontend using React
Used view.getContext() to access user and theme info
API calls were made with requestConfluence() to fetch user details securely
State and side effects were handled using useState and useEffect in React
Permissions were configured via manifest.yml to allow secure API access

🧩 Challenges we ran into

Understanding how permissions and scopes work in the manifest.yml
Figuring out the difference between Forge UI vs Custom UI, and when to use which
Handling asynchronous API calls inside React's useEffect properly
Testing and debugging API responses in a secure sandboxed environment

🏆 Accomplishments that we're proud of

Successfully used real Confluence data (account ID, public name) in a custom UI
Deployed and ran a fully functional app inside a live Confluence space
Built a strong foundation to expand into more advanced Forge apps
Gained practical experience integrating frontend React logic with Atlassian’s cloud APIs

📚 What we learned

How to set up and structure a Forge project from scratch
How to work with Forge context APIs, @forge/bridge, and REST integrations
The power of building apps within Confluence without managing infrastructure
How to work with React in a cloud environment, managing state and effects cleanly