Migrating users from Confluence to JIRA

There is currently no way to delegate user management from JIRA to Confluence. So, if you are in a situation where your users are defined in Confluence and would like to take advantage of Confluence's ability to use JIRA user management, you will need to transfer all of your existing Confluence users into JIRA. You can do this manually, or if you have a large number of users, you can use the attached XML-RPC script.

You should backup your JIRA installation before running this script. This is an experimental script that has not gone through the same extensive testing as the Confluence and JIRA products.

Getting the migration tool

• Download the attached rpc-tools-0.9.zip.
• Extract the ZIP file to a temporary directory on your computer.

Patching Confluence 2.0.x

A patched RPC plugin is included in the ZIP file to allow remote retrieval of a full list of users from Confluence 2.0.x. To install it:

• In your Confluence webapp, move confluence/WEB-INF/lib/confluencerpc.jar to a backup location
• Copy plugins-confluencerpc.jar from the patch/ directory in the extracted ZIP file to confluence/WEB-INF/lib.

No patch is required for Confluence 2.1 and later.

Running the migration tool

• Back up your JIRA database.
• If you do not have an 'admin' username with password 'admin' in both JIRA and Confluence, create it now.
• Ensure JIRA and Confluence have remote API access enabled. In both applications, it is configured in the General Configuration screen in Administration.
• Edit connection.properties in the extracted ZIP file to the set the XML-RPC URLs for JIRA and Confluence. The XML-RPC URLs in the default file correspond to the following application base URLs:
  • JIRA - http://localhost:8080
  • Confluence - http://localhost:8080/confluence
• Run java -jar tools.jar in the extracted ZIP file directory.

A successful run will generate output like the following:

$ java -jar tools.jar
- Transferring group: confluence-administrators
- Transferring group: confluence-users
- Transferring user: testuser1
- Transferring user: testuser2

Things to note:

• This script requires that both the Confluence and JIRA remote APIs are available and accessible to a username 'admin', password 'admin'. You can temporarily add this user to both system to run the script, then remove it afterwards.
• A random password will be assigned to each user that is transferred because it is not possible to access password information via the XML-RPC API. Therefore they will have retrieve a new password via the password reminder.

• JIRA does not allow users to sign up if they do not have a valid email address. Therefore we will assign them an email address of type username@example.com to any Confluence users that do not have a email address. This will allow you to find the users and help them to create a password or change the email address.

Trouble running the script?

• Ensure you have created a user 'admin' with password 'admin' in both Confluence and JIRA.
• Ensure both applications have remote API access enabled (see above).
• Ensure you have patched the Confluence RPC plugin if running Confluence 2.0.x.

If you're still having trouble, please raise a support request, and include a copy of the error you're getting.