Connecting to Crowd or another Jira application for user management

You can connect your Jira application to Atlassian Crowd or to another Jira Data Center application (version 4.3 or later) for management of users and groups, and for authentication (verification of a user's login). 

For all of the following procedures, you must be logged in as a user with the Jira system administrator global permissions.

On this page:

Connecting a Jira application to Crowd

Atlassian Crowd is an application security framework that handles authentication and authorization for your web-based applications. With Crowd you can integrate multiple web applications and user directories, with support for single sign-on (SSO) and centralized identity management. The Crowd Administration Console provides a web interface for managing directories, users and their permissions. See the Administration Guide.

When to use this option: Connect to Crowd if you want to use the full Crowd functionality to manage your directories, users and groups. You can connect your Crowd server to a number of directories of all types that Crowd supports, including custom directory connectors.

To connect a Jira application to Crowd:

  1. Go to your Crowd Administration Console and define the Jira application to Crowd. See the Crowd documentation: Adding an Application.
  2. In the upper-right corner of the screen, select Administration User Management.

  3. In the sidebar, select User directories.
  4. Select Add directory and then select the Atlassian Crowd directory type. Enter the settings as described in the following sections.
  5. Save the directory settings.
  6. Define the directory order by clicking the blue up- and down-arrows next to each directory on the User directories screen. Here is a summary of how the directory order affects the processing:
    • The order of the directories is the order in which they will be searched for users and groups.
    • Changes to users and groups will be made only in the first directory where the application has permission to make changes.
    For details, see Managing multiple directories.
  7. If required, configure Jira to use Crowd for single sign-on () too. See the Crowd documentation: Integrating Crowd with Atlassian Jira.

If you have Jira-Crowd-, every time user logs in (i.e. first and subsequent times), the user's data in Jira/Crowd will be updated from the user's data in . This includes username, display name, email and group memberships. For details, see Update group memberships when logging in under the Advanced settings. 

Settings in Jira applications for the Crowd directory type

Setting

Description

Name

A meaningful name that will help you to identify this Crowd server amongst your list of directory servers. Examples:

  • Crowd Data Center
  • Example Company Crowd

Server URL

The web address of your Crowd console server. Examples:

  • http://www.example.com:8095/crowd/
  • http://crowd.example.com

Application Name

The name of your application, as recognized by your Crowd server. Note that you will need to define the application in Crowd too, using the Crowd administration Console. See the Crowd documentation on adding an application.

Application Password

The password which the application will use when it authenticates against the Crowd framework as a client. This must be the same as the password you have registered in Crowd for this application. See the Crowd documentation on adding an application.

Crowd permissions

Setting

Description

Read Only

The users, groups and memberships in this directory are retrieved from Crowd and can only be modified via Crowd. You cannot modify Crowd users, groups or memberships via the application administration screens.

Read/Write

The users, groups and memberships in this directory are retrieved from Crowd. When you modify a user, group or membership via the application administration screens, the changes will be applied directly to Crowd. Please ensure that the application has modification permissions for the relevant directories in Crowd. See the Crowd documentation: Specifying an Application's Directory Permissions.

Advanced Crowd settings

Setting

Description

Enable Nested Groups

Enable or disable support for nested groups. Before enabling nested groups, please check to see if the user directory or directories in Crowd support nested groups. When nested groups are enabled, you can define a group as a member of another group. If you are using groups to manage permissions, you can create nested groups to allow inheritance of permissions from one group to its sub-groups.

Enable Incremental SynchronizationEnable or disable incremental synchronization. Only changes since the last synchronization will be retrieved when synchronizing a directory. Note that full synchronization is always executed when restarting the application.

Synchronization Interval (minutes)

Synchronization is the process by which the application updates its internal store of user data to agree with the data on the directory server. The application will send a request to your directory server every x minutes, where 'x' is the number specified here. The default value is 60 minutes.

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See centralized user management.

Connecting Jira applications to another server

Subject to certain limitations, you can connect a number of Atlassian applications to a single JIRA application for centralized user management.

When to use this option: You can connect to a server running Jira 4.3 or later, Jira Software 7.0 or later, Jira Core 7.0 or later, or Jira Service Management (formerly Jira Service Desk) 3.0 or later. Choose this option as an alternative to Atlassian Crowd, for simple configurations with a limited number of users.

Let's assume that you have two Jira application servers, called for example Jira instance 1 and Jira instance  2. You want Jira instance 2 to manage your users and groups. Jira instance 1 will delegate user management to Jira instance 2.

To connect Jira instance 1 to use Jira instance 2 for user management:

  1. Configure Jira instance 2 to recognize Jira instance 1:
    1. In the upper-right corner of the screen, select Administration User Management.
    2. In the sidebar, select Jira user server.
    3. Add an application.
    4. Enter the application name and password that Jira instance 1 will use when accessing Jira instance 2.
    5. Enter the IP address or addresses of Jira instance 1. Valid values are:
      • A full IP address, e.g. 192.168.10.12.
      • A wildcard IP range, using CIDR notation, e.g. 192.168.10.1/16. For more information, see the introduction to CIDR notation on Wikipedia and RFC 4632.
    6. Save the new application.
  2. Configure Jira instance 1 to delegate user management:
    1. In the upper-right corner of the screen, select Administration User Management.
    2. In the sidebar, select User directories.
    3. Add a directory and select type Atlassian Jira.
    4. Enter the settings as described below. When asked for the application name and password, enter the values that you defined in the settings on Jira instance 2.
    5. Save the directory settings.
    6. Define the directory order by clicking the blue up- and down-arrows next to each directory on the User directories screen. Here is a summary of how the directory order affects the processing:
      • The order of the directories is the order in which they will be searched for users and groups.
      • Changes to users and groups will be made only in the first directory where the application has permission to make changes.
      For details, see Managing multiple directories.

Settings for the Jira application directory type

Setting

Description

Name

A meaningful name that will help you to identify this Jira server in the list of directory servers. Examples:

  • Jira Software
  • My Company Jira

Server URL

The web address of your Jira server. Examples:

  • http://www.example.com:8080
  • http://jira.example.com

Application Name

The name used by your application when accessing the Jira server that acts as user manager. Note that you will also need to define your application to that Jira server, via the 'Other Applications' option in the 'Users, Groups & Roles' section of the 'Administration' menu.

Application Password

The password used by your application when accessing the Jira server that acts as user manager.

Permissions for the Jira application directory type

Setting

Description

Read Only

The users, groups and memberships in this directory are retrieved from the Jira server that is acting as user manager. They can only be modified via that JIRA server.

Advanced Settings for the Jira application directory type

Setting

Description

Enable Nested Groups

Enable or disable support for nested groups. Before enabling nested groups, please check to see if nested groups are enabled on the JIRA server that is acting as the user manager. When nested groups are enabled, you can define a group as a member of another group. If you are using groups to manage permissions, you can create nested groups to allow the inheritance of permissions from one group to its sub-groups.

Update group memberships when logging in      

This setting enables updating group memberships during authentication and can be set to the following options:

  • Every time the user logs in: during the authentication, the user’s direct group memberships will be updated to match what’s in the remote directory:

    • Remove the user from all groups that the user no longer belongs to in the remote directory.

    • Add the user to all the groups that the user belongs to in the remote directory. New groups with matching names and descriptions will be created locally if needed. The group will only contain the current user and other memberships will be populated when users who belong to the same group log in or when the synchronization happens.

  • For newly added users only: when a new user logs in for the first time, the user’s direct group memberships will be updated to match what’s in the remote directory.

    Consider that the user's group memberships will be updated only if the user was created during the authentication.

  • Never: during the authentication, the user's group memberships won’t change, even if the local state doesn’t match what’s in the remote.

Synchronization Interval (minutes)

Synchronization is the process by which the application updates its internal store of user data to agree with the data on the directory server. The application will send a request to your directory server every x minutes, where 'x' is the number specified here. The default value is 60 minutes.

Diagrams of some possible configurations

Diagram: Confluence, Jira and other applications connecting to Crowd for user management.

Diagram above: One Jira site connecting to another for user management. Jira site 2 does the user management, storing the user data in its internal directory.

Diagram: A number of applications connecting to Jira (site 2) for user management, with Jira in turn connecting to an LDAP server.

Last modified on Nov 30, 2023

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