Retrieving the JIRA Administrator

On this page:

Scenario A: I don't know which user has the JIRA Administrators or JIRA System Administrators global permission

You first need to find out which group(s) have been granted the global permission.

The JIRA System Administrators global permission was added to JIRA in version 3.12. Anyone granted the JIRA System Administrators global permission can perform all administration tasks in JIRA, whereas anyone granted the JIRA Administrators global permission can perform most but not all administration tasks. Prior to version 3.12, anyone granted the JIRA Administrators global permission can perform all administration tasks.

To find out which group(s) have been granted the JIRA Administrators global permission, run the following database query:

To find out which group(s) have been granted the JIRA System Administrators global permission, run the following database query:

Now that you know which group(s) have the global permission, run the following database query to find out which users are in that group (replace "jira-administrators" with the group returned by the above query):

If you don't know the password for the user(s) returned by this query, move on to Scenario B.

If there are no JIRA Administrators

If you're using Crowd or an external user management system, there may be no users with administrator permissions.
Find the groups in the external management system that you want to grant the administrator permissions and do the following:

1. Shutdown JIRA.
   
   

2. Use SQL to assign the appropriate group to the administrator permissions similar to this:

   
   
   

3. Restart JIRA.

If you are still not able to log in with the user, please make sure that the new user is present in the 'userbase' table and is member of the group 'jira-users' in the 'membershipbase' table.

Scenario B: I know which user has the JIRA Administrators or JIRA System Administrators global permission, but I have forgotten the password

Here are two different ways you can solve this problem:

1. Send it via email

This is the recommended approach

If you have configured JIRA to send email, just click on the Forgot Password link on the login page, enter your username and click the Send it to me button. You will receive an email which will help you reset your password.

2. Set the password directly in the database

This is a last resort only.

You can also update the password hash stored for a user in your database. Run the following command to set the user called XXXX's password to the word sphere.

Then restart your JIRA instance.

Note that this will only work for users in the Internal directory, as otherwise authentication is done externally (eg in an LDAP server). You can find which directory a user belongs to by comparing the directory_id in cwd_user to those in cwd_directory.