Documentation for JIRA 5.2. Documentation for other versions of JIRA is available too.

Currently JIRA does not have the ability to change usernames. If you are interested in this feature you may wish to vote and watch  JRA-1549 - Getting issue details... STATUS .

Recommended Workaround

The work around at this time is to create a new user and then bulk change (both reporter and assignee) issues to this new user. This method does not cater for comments, mentions and overall history of an issue.

If JIRA does not allow the bulk change operation due to 'Closed' status, you will need to apply Allow editing of Closed Issues first.

Other Workaround

Please note that editing the database or any XML backup is not supported by Atlassian.

Do not use this to try and merge two users into one.

In the past some customers have manually edited usernames in the database, this is not recommended due to the number of places the username is referenced (comments and filters for example).

Other customers have chosen to directly edit a XML backup using the following method:

  1. Create an XML Backup
  2. Execute a global find and replace for the username
  3. Restore JIRA with the new backup

If the username is a common word (e.g. admin), you may replace text that is not relevant to the user. So please be aware of this issue when performing the replace.

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2 Comments

  1. Nabil Sayegh

    Jun 24, 2013

    This is not practical. Changing usernames (actually realnames and thus e-mail addresses) is very common, especially after marriages. And apart from the downtime, XML dumps are discouraged everywhere in your documentation.

    Why are usernames (e-mail addresses) stored anyway? The directory has a "User Name RDN Attribute". If that would be used everywhere, changing usernames would be trivial.

    1. Andrew

      Jun 24, 2013

      Hi Nabil,

      Can I recommend upgrading to JIRA 6.0, if that is an option for you. JIRA does allow usernames to be changed in JIRA 6.0 (see Managing Users).

      Kind Regards,
      Andrew



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