Practical JIRA Administration

Chapter 7. The User Lifecycle

Overview

One of the areas that a new JIRA administrator commonly feels uncertain about is adding, modifying, and deactivating users in JIRA. This chapter covers some of the different aspects of the lifecycle of a JIRA user.

Adding Users

Before someone can log into JIRA, a JIRA administrator has to create a user account for them. A JIRA administrator is someone in the jira-administrators or jira-system-administrators groups,¹ not someone in the project role Administrators.

As one might expect, JIRA has an internal user directory of user accounts, but there are also a number of other ways to define JIRA users.

When you add new users to JIRA you can just look an existing user’s groups and take those as a template for what the new user needs. However this can soon become confusing. A better idea is to have the expected use of JIRA groups and project roles documented somewhere for each JIRA project. It’s an odd quirk that JIRA groups don’t have a description associated with them, and cannot be easily renamed.

The most common request is to have JIRA work with user accounts that have already been defined for other applications and network domains. For example, many organizations have a Microsoft Active Directory (AD) server where users and groups are defined. Such groups may even contain email aliases that users can modify themselves. JIRA can use such directory services in a number of different ways:

Authentication

The passwords for JIRA users are the same as ...