Documentation for JIRA 4.3. Documentation for other versions of JIRA is available too.
JIRA provides the ability to specify the format of project keys within the system. This is achieved by defining a regular expression 'rule' that governs the valid project key format.
Please Note:
Through the property jira.projectkey.pattern
, the administrator can specify a Perl5 regular expression defining the rule for a valid project key. During project creation, the user must specify a project key that conforms to this rule.This can be done by editing jira-application.properties. You will then need to restart JIRA (JIRA Standalone) or rebuild the JIRA webapp and redeploy in your app server
By default, the JIRA project key configuration requires two or more uppercase alphabetical characters — based on the regular expression ([A-Z][A-Z]+
).
To configure a different rule for your Project Key syntax, change the regular expression in the <jira-install/atlassian-jira/WEB-INF/classes/jira-application.properties
file. Below is a list of common examples and patterns:
Pattern Requested | Expression needed | Resulting Issue IDs | Comments |
---|---|---|---|
XXYY, where X indicates two fixed letters, Y represents two fixed digits | ( | TQ09-01, TQ09-02, etc. |
|
XZ+, where X indicates one fixed letter, Z+ presents one or more digit or alphabet | ( | ACAT51-1, AAA5-1330, A20091-15 |
|
JIRA prepends the regular expression specified with '^' and closes it with '$' for an exact matching rule within the system. The project key must only be allowed to contain ASCII characters, as it is used in HTTP GET requests.
Do not use "." and "-"
-
) character, as this character is inserted automatically after the regular expression and before the issue ID number..
) character (i.e. dot/period/full-stop), as the CreateOrCommentHandler currently fails to add comments to existing issues if the project key contains a dot(.) — see JRA-23180.If JIRA detects that the project key entered does not match the jira.projectkey.pattern
, it will throw the error message defined in jira.projectkey.warning
.
You can change jira.projectkey.warning
in the jira-application.properties
so that when a user keys in the wrong format, they will be informed of the correct pattern to use.
A variety of tools allow searching using a Regular Expression. Most text editors will allow a Regular Expression search. There are also a variety of websites available to for testing a Regular Expression available from an Internet search.
The jira-application.properties
file also contains the following properties:
jira.projectkey.description
— a configurable description (to match the project key pattern) displayed on project creationjira.projectkey.warning
— a configurable validation warning (to match the project key pattern)It is not possible to configure the issue key pattern as JIRA expects this key to conform to specific rules.
Further information on Perl5 is available here.