Connecting to Crowd or JIRA for User Management

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

On this page:

The information on this page does not apply to Confluence Cloud.

Connecting Confluence to Crowd for User Management

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 Confluence to Crowd:

Go to your Crowd Administration Console and define the Confluence application to Crowd. See the Crowd documentation: Adding an Application.
Choose the cog icon , then choose General Configuration under Confluence Administration
Click 'User Directories' in the left-hand panel.
Add a directory and select type 'Atlassian Crowd'. Enter the settings as described below.
Save the directory settings.
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:
- Changes to users and groups will be made only in the first directory where the application has permission to make changes.
- The order of the directories is the order in which they will be searched for users and groups (by default Confluence aggregates group membership from all directories, so the order does not impact membership itself).
For details see Managing Multiple Directories.
If required, configure Confluence to use Crowd for single sign-on (SSO) too. See the Crowd documentation: Integrating Crowd with Atlassian Confluence.

Crowd Settings in Confluence

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, 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 Synchronization	Enable 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.

Connecting Confluence to JIRA for User Management

Note that the license tiers for JIRA and Confluence do not need to match to use this feature. For example, you can manage a Confluence 50 user license with JIRA, even if JIRA only has a 25 user license.

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.

If you are running JIRA 4.2 or earlier, please see Connecting to JIRA 4.2 or Earlier for User Management.

To connect Confluence to JIRA 4.3 or later:

Go to your JIRA administration screen and define the Confluence application to JIRA:
- For JIRA 4.3.x, select 'Other Applications' from the 'Users, Groups & Roles' section of the 'Administration' menu.
- For JIRA 4.4 or later, select 'Users' > 'JIRA User Server' in Administration mode.
- Click 'Add Application'.
- Enter the application name and password that Confluence will use when accessing JIRA.
- Enter the IP address or addresses of your Confluence server. 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.
- Save the new application.
Set up the JIRA user directory in Confluence:
- Choose the cog icon , then choose General Configuration under Confluence Administration
- Click 'User Directories' in the left-hand panel.
- Add a directory and select type 'Atlassian JIRA'.
- Enter the settings as described below. When asked for the application name and password, enter the values that you defined for your Confluence application in the settings on JIRA.
- Save the directory settings.
- 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.
In order to use Confluence, users must be a member of the confluence-users group or have Confluence 'can use' permission. Follow these steps to configure your Confluence groups in your Jira application:
1. Add the confluence-users and confluence-administrators groups in your Jira application.
2. Add your own username as a member of both of the above groups.
3. Select one of the following methods to give your existing Jira users access to Confluence:
  - Option 1: In your Jira application, find the groups that the relevant users belong to. Add the groups as members of one or both of the above Confluence groups.
  - Option 2: Log in to Confluence using your Jira account and go to the Confluence Administration Console. Click Global Permissions and assign the can use permission to the relevant Jira groups.

Ensure that you have added Confluence URL into JIRA Whitelist in JIRA Administration >> System >> Security >> Whitelist. For example: https://confluence.atlassian.com/ or refer to this guide: Configuring the Whitelist

JIRA Settings in Confluence

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.

JIRA Permissions

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 JIRA Settings

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: Confluence connecting to JIRA for user management.

Diagram above: Confluence connecting to JIRA for user management, with JIRA in turn connecting to LDAP.

Troubleshooting

Below are some error messages you may encounter. If you run into problems, you should turn on WARN logging for the relevant class. See Configuring Logging.

Error

Message

Cause

error.jirabaseurl.connection.refused

Connection refused. Check if an instance of JIRA 4.3 or later is running on the given url

This may be because:

JIRA url is incorrect
JIRA instance is not running on the specified url.
JIRA instance running on the specified url is not 4.3 or later.

error.applicationlink.connection.refused

Failed to establish application link between JIRA server and Confluence server.

Unable to create an application link between JIRA and Confluence. This may be because:

Confluence or JIRA url is incorrect
the instance is not running on the specified url
credentials are incorrect.

Refer to the Confluence log files for further troubleshooting information.

error.jirabaseurl.not.valid

This is not a valid url for JIRA 4.3 or later.

A runtime exception has occured. Refer to the Confluence log files for further troubleshooting information.

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