Managing Groups

JIRA's default groups

When you install JIRA, three groups are automatically created:

You can create and delete groups according to your organisation's requirements.

Please Note: If you are using External User Management, you will not be able to create, delete or edit groups or group membership from within JIRA; and 'Automatic Group Membership' (see below) will not apply. However, you can still assign groups to project roles.

Viewing groups

To see what groups exist, and where they are used:

1. Log in as a user with the 'JIRA Administrators' global permission.
2. Select 'Administration' > 'Users' > 'Groups' to open the 'Group Browser' page as shown in the screenshot below.
   Keyboard shortcut: 'g' + 'g' + start typing 'groups'
3. To see which permission schemes, email notification schemes, issue security levels and saved filters are using this group, click the group name.

Screenshot 1: the Group Browser

Please Note: The 'Filter Group' form restricts the list of groups shown to those that match the 'Name Contains', with a specified maximum per page. Click the 'Filter' button to refresh the list with the restricting filter.

Adding a group

To create a group, enter the new group 'Name' in the 'Add Group' form in the 'Group Browser' (see 'Viewing groups' above) and click the 'Add Group' button.

Deleting a group

To delete a group, click the 'Delete' link for that group in the 'Group Browser' (see 'Viewing groups' above). The confirmation screen that follows explains that users will be removed from the group through its deletion. Be aware of the impact this may have on users in that group. For example, if that group membership was the sole conveyor of a permission for a user, then the user will no longer have that permission.

Please Note: Before deleting a group it is recommended that you check whether the groups is being used by any permission schemes, email notification schemes, issue security levels or saved filters. See 'Viewing groups' (above).

Editing group membership

To edit a group's membership, click the 'Edit Members' link in the row for that group in the 'Group Browser' (see 'Viewing groups' above). This takes you to a form allowing you to add users to or remove them from the group.

Please Note:

• If the group has the 'JIRA System Administrators' global permission, you cannot edit its membership unless you have the 'JIRA System Administrators' global permission.
• If you have a user limited license (e.g. personal license) and have reached your user limit, you will not be able to assign any further users to groups with login permissions (i.e. jira-users permission) without first reducing the number of users with login permissions.

Automatic group membership

To automatically add newly-created users to a particular group, you can either:

• Grant the group the 'JIRA Users' global permission.
  Add the 'JIRA Users' permission to the relevant group, as described in 'Granting global permissions'.
  

• Specify the group name in the 'Default Group Memberships' option when Connecting to an LDAP Directory.
  See Adding Users to Groups Automatically.

Notes

• Multiple user directories:
  You may define multiple user directories in JIRA, so that JIRA looks in more than one place for its users and groups. For example, you may use the default JIRA internal directory and also connect to an LDAP directory server. In such cases, you can define the directory order to determine where JIRA looks first when processing users and groups. 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.

  See Managing Multiple Directories.

• Nested groups: Some directory servers allow you to define a group as a member of another group. Groups in such a structure are called 'nested groups'. 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. See Managing Nested Groups.