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: open the website, focus the search box, search, filter, and so on. 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. Also, using Quicklinks for internal doc searching isn’t really ideal. Over time, the links you need to visit or save only keep 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, then Profile (avatar) → Personal Access Tokens → Create token (keep the token safe; if it leaks, revoke it immediately)
- Jira Base URL: 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 just 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.
Currently, Atlassian Data Center provides the following 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, and supports a few simple actions such as transitioning issue status and creating worklogs
- Board View - Boards, such as the current Active Sprint
- Worklog View - Your worklogs
- Notification 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
Each search panel includes many commonly used filters (usually more than enough for everyday use):
- Search Contents
- All Contents
- Full Text Search - Expand the search scope from title ~ "xxx" to text ~ "xxx", instead of only searching titles
- 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. I think favoriting articles is a good alternative (the Action Panel provides quick Favorite/Unfavorite actions). When searching, just switch to the My Favourites option.
In addition, it also supports typing full CQL or JQL for customized advanced queries:
One more thing:
Since Jira allows custom fields—and there are many field types, and each Jira instance can differ a lot—the extension includes the Manage Fields command to help Search Issues show more information.
For example, search for Test Engineer on the Manage Fields screen and add it via “Add to Search”. Then the Search Issues list will display that field.
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
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
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