Connecting to external user directories in Bamboo

You can connect Bamboo to external user directories. This allows you to use existing users and groups stored in an enterprise directory, and to manage those users and groups in one place.

User management functions include:

• Authentication: determining which user identity is sending a request to Bamboo.
• Authorization: determining the access privileges for an authenticated user.
• User management: maintaining profile information in user's accounts.
• Group membership: storing and retrieving groups, and group membership.

It is important to understand that these are separate components of a user management system. You could use an external directory for any or all of the above tasks.

There are several approaches to consider when using external user directories wth Bamboo, described briefly below:

LDAP

You should consider connecting to an LDAP directory server if your users and groups are stored in an enterprise directory. See Integrating Bamboo with LDAP for instructions. 

Bamboo is able to connect to the following LDAP directory servers:

• Microsoft Active Directory
• Apache Directory Server (ApacheDS) 1.0.x and 1.5.x
• Apple Open Directory (Read-Only)
• Fedora Directory Server (Read-Only Posix Schema)
• Novell eDirectory Server
• OpenDS
• OpenLDAP
• OpenLDAP (Read-Only Posix Schema)
• Generic Posix/RFC2307 Directory (Read-Only)
• Sun Directory Server Enterprise Edition (DSEE)
• Any generic LDAP directory server

Crowd

You can connect Bamboo to Atlassian Crowd for user and group management, as well as for user authentication.

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

You should consider connecting to Crowd if you want to use Crowd to manage existing users and groups in multiple directory types, or if you have users of other web-based applications.

See Integrating Bamboo with Crowd for configuration instructions.

Multiple directories

When Bamboo is connected directly to multiple user directories, where duplicate user names and group names are used across those directories, the effective group memberships that Bamboo uses for authorization can be determined using either of these two schemes: 

• 'aggregating membership'
• 'non-aggregating membership'. 

See Effective memberships with multiple directories for more information about these two schemes.

Note that:

• Aggregating membership is used by default for new installations of Bamboo.
• Authentication, for when Bamboo is connected to multiple directories, only depends on the mapped groups in those directories – the aggregation scheme is not involved at all.
• The directory order is significant during the authentication of the user, in cases where the same user exists in multiple directories. When a user attempts to log in, the application will search the directories in the order specified, and will use the credentials (password) of the first occurrence of the user to validate the login attempt.
• For inactive users, Bamboo only checks if the user is active in the first (highest priority) directory in which they are found for the purpose of determining authentication. Whether a user is active or inactive does not affect how their memberships are determined.
• When a user is added to a group, they are only added to the first writeable directory available, in priority order.
• When a user is removed from a group, they are only removed from the group in the first directory the user appears in, when non-aggregating membership is used. With aggregating membership, they are removed from the group in all directories the user exists in.
• When using Single Sign-On with Crowd and multiple Crowd directories:
  • signed-in users will be validated against the first Crowd directory the user is in
  • users that haven't signed in yet, but have a valid Crowd SSO cookie will be validated against all configured Crowd directories in order

A Bamboo admin can change the membership scheme used by Bamboo using the following commands:

• To change to aggregating membership, substitute your own values for <username>, <password> and <base-url> in this command:

  curl -H 'Content-type: application/json' -X PUT -d '{"membershipAggregationEnabled":true}' -u <username>:<password> <base-url>/rest/crowd/latest/application 

• To change to non-aggregating membership, substitute your own values for <username>, <password> and <base-url> in this command:

  curl -H 'Content-type: application/json' -X PUT -d '{"membershipAggregationEnabled":false}' -u <username>:<password> <base-url>/rest/crowd/latest/application 

Note that these operations are different from how you make these changes in Crowd. Note also that changing the aggregation scheme can affect the authorization permissions for your users, and how directory update operations are performed.