Access to Application Links

Hi

We’ve an Force and Connect apps which can connect to on-prem Atlassian apps. For example from Confluence Cloud to Bitbucket Data Center. Atlassian has the Application Link mechanism to connect and authenticate these systems. It got even improved with Application Tunnels, which is a good solution to connect a on-prem app behind a Firewall with a Cloud app.

DC apps can take advantage of this work. However, Atlassian Cloud apps (Forge and Connect) can’t use this infrastructure. Or am I missing something?

This lead us to ugly solutions:

  • Duplicating configuration for our cloud apps when you want to connect to a on prem app.
  • Plus that duplication has its own, different security mechanism. (ex. API tokens to manage)
  • If the on-prem app is behind a Firewall, we have no satisfying solution. Currently the customer has to open a gigantic IP range (like AWS datacenter IP ranges). Or we would have add our own tunneling mechanism.

So, it would be really nice if a Cloud app could take advantage of the App Links. So far I didn’t find any hint that this is possible?

I hope that at some point Forge can offer an API to use the application links.

PS: here are our feature requests for Forge and Connect.

2 Likes

I see this post is a year old now. Have you discovered any solutions to connect to a local atlassian server through the application link or directly through the Application Tunnel? Also see my related request here: Solved: Jira Automation Web Request through Application Tu...*

We get more support request for this periodically. (For Connect apps, but Forge has the same issue): Either they ask directly why the Atlassian Tunnel doesn’t work for our app, or as on how to connect our app.

For the our main Cloud app we have mostly ‘re-implemented’ the app link mechanism:

You have to configure the same link again for our app.

You have to configure a API token for now. (Mostly because we didn’t want to implement OAuth 1.0a, but by now you could go with OAuth 2.0?)

Then we have an extra option where you can choose to the app to use static IPs for outgoing traffic. So that you can let our app through the firewall. Not as good as Atlassian Tunnel, but so far it seems to work for our customer cases.

Anyway, its ugly to have it duplicated and introduce all this extra wholes to let the application talk. :disappointed: