In JIRA, each user needs to have an account for him/her to access JIRA, unless JIRA is configured to allow anonymous access (by selecting the Anyone group in the Browse Project permission scheme; please refer to the Permission Schemes section in this chapter for details). Each user is identified by his/her username, starting with JIRA 6, which can be changed after the account is created.
User Browser is where you will be able to see a list of all the users in JIRA, including their usernames, e-mail addresses, last login attempt, and which user directory they belong to. User Browser also provides you with search capabilities. You will be able to search for users that fit in the criteria such as username, full name, e-mail address, and group association. Perform the following steps to access the user browser:
- Browse to the JIRA administration console.
- Select the User management tab and then the Users option. This will bring up the User Browser page.
By default, the results will be paginated to show 20 users per page, but you can change this setting to show up to 100 users per page. When dealing with large deployments having hundreds of users, these options will become very useful to quickly find the users you need to manage.
Other than providing the ability for you to effectively search for users, User Browser also serves as the portal for you to add new users to JIRA and manage a user's group/role associations:
New users can be added to JIRA in a number of ways:
- Direct creation by the JIRA administrator
- Invitation by the JIRA administrator to create an account
- By signing up for an account if the public signup option is enabled
- Synchronization of user accounts from an external user repository such as LDAP
The first and second options have centralized management, where only the JIRA administrators can create and maintain user accounts. This option is applicable to the most private JIRA instances designed to be used by an organization's internal users.
The third option allows users to sign up for accounts by themselves. This is most useful when you run a public JIRA instance, where manually creating user accounts is not scalable enough to handle the volume. We will be looking at how to enable public signup options in later sections in this chapter. For now, we will examine how administrators can create user accounts manually:
- Browse to the User Browser page.
- Click on the Create User button. This will bring you to the Create New User dialog box.
- Enter a unique username for the new user.
- Enter the password, full name, and e-mail address for the user. If you do not enter a password, a random password will be generated. You should select the Send Notification Email option in the following step for the new user to reset his/her password.
- Optionally, select the Send Notification Email option if you have an outgoing mail server configured for JIRA (see Chapter 7, E-mails and Notifications). If checked, JIRA will send an e-mail to the user with a link for them to set his/her password.
- Click on the Create button to create the new user.
Alternatively, the administrator can also choose to invite users so that they can create their accounts themselves. This is different than the public signup option, since only recipients of the invitations will be able to create accounts. For this feature to work, you will need to have an outgoing mail server configured as the invitations will be sent as e-mails. Perform the following steps to invite users to sign up:
- Browse to the User Browser page.
- Click on the Invite Users button. This will bring you to the Invite Users dialog box.
- Specify the e-mail addresses for the people you wish to invite. You can invite multiple people at once.
- Click on the Send button to send out the invitations.
If your JIRA is public (for example, a public support system), then creating user accounts individually as explained earlier will become a very demanding job for your administrator. For this type of JIRA setup, you can enable public signup to allow users to create accounts by themselves. Perform the following steps to enable public signup in JIRA:
- Browse to the JIRA administration console.
- Select the Systems tab and then the General Configuration option.
- Click on the Edit Settings button.
- Select Public for the Mode field.
- Click on the Update button to apply the setting.
Once you have set JIRA to run in the Public mode, users will be able to sign up and create their own accounts from the login page:
As you will see in the later section Global permissions in this chapter, once a user signs up for a new account, he/she will automatically join groups with JIRA users' global permission. If you have set JIRA to run in the Private mode, then only the administrator will be able to create new accounts.
If your running JIRA in the Public mode, you run the risk of having automated spam bots creating user accounts on your system. To counter this, JIRA provides the CAPTCHA service, where potential users will be required to type a word represented in an image into a text field. Perform the following steps to enable the CAPTCHA service:
- Browse to the JIRA administration console.
- Select Systems tab and then the General Configuration option.
- Click on the Edit Settings button.
- Select On for the CAPTCHA on sign up field.
- Click on the Update button to apply the setting.
Now, when someone tries to sign up for an account, JIRA will present him/her with a CAPTCHA challenge that must be verified before the account is created:
