Single Sign-on Integration with JIRA and Confluence

The content on this page relates to platforms which are not supported for Confluence and JIRA. Consequently, Atlassian can not guarantee providing any support for these solutions. Please be aware that this material is provided for your information only and using it is done so at your own risk. Note that Crowd, as an Atlassian product, is supported.

A Single Sign On system allows users to use a single login for multiple applications. You can integrate JIRA and Confluence with the following SSO systems:

• Crowd (Recommended) - Atlassian's single sign-on, authentication, authorisation, application provisioning and identity management framework

Additionally, people have reported some degree of success integrating the following SSO systems with JIRA and/or Confluence:

• SiteMinder
• CAS
• Kerberos
• JOSSO
• Open Fusion

Writing a custom authenticator

JIRA and Confluence integrate with SSO system Seraph, the Atlassian authentication library. Seraph is a very simple, pluggable J2EE web application security framework developed by Atlassian and used in our products.

Seraph allows you to write custom authenticators which will accept the login creditentials of your existing single sign-on system.

A few tips for writing your own custom authenticator for Confluence:

• For Confluence 2.2 and above you must extend com.atlassian.confluence.user.ConfluenceAuthenticator instead of the Seraph DefaultAuthenticator.
• The authenticator should not be a plugin. It should be placed in the class path by putting it in WEB-INF/classes or as a jar in WEB-INF/lib
• The authenticator should have a public constructor that takes no arguments.
• Dependency injection via setters or auto-wiring by name is not available to authenticators. Use ContainerManager.getInstance(...) instead.
• The authenticators are constructed before beans are available via ContainerManager.getInstance(...), so the getInstance method needs to be called at runtime and not in the constructor.

Existing custom authenticators

Check out these examples:

• Atlassian SSO Authentication for Windows/Active Directory Environments (via Kerberos) by AppFusions, including authenticators for Confluence, JIRA, FishEye, Crucible, and Crowd.
• CAS for Confluence, contributed by Carl Harris at Virginia Tech.)
• CAS for JIRA, contributed by Carl Harris at Virginia Tech.)
• Siteminder for Confluence, contributed by Ricardo Sueiras)
• Shibboleth Plugin

There has been discussion of integrating with Siteminder on the mailing list that may be applied to JIRA integration. All third-party code must be treated with caution - always backup your Confluence instance before use. If you create a custom SSO plugin and would like to contribute it to the user community, please let us know on a support ticket.

Discussion Forums

Seraph Discussion Forums

Using Confluence and JIRA without SSO

Confluence can also delegate user management to use JIRA logins , but this will not provide you with SSO.