Issues allowing Jira users to log into Confluence

[Shaun Penton]

I am trying to grant access to my Jira users to log into Confluence.

n the document "Connecting to Crowd or Jira for User Management" (https://confluence.atlassian.com/doc/connecting-to-crowd-or-jira-for-user-management-229838465.html), it has these instructions:

3. 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. Choose 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.

I've done the pre-requisite steps (not included above), and also steps 1 and 2 above.  In step 3, I can't complete option 1, as I can't add a group to another group.  I can't complete option 2, as the 'relevant JIRA groups' don't appear anywhere in confluence.

I don't particularly want to install Crowd; looking at the above support document, I shouldn't have to.  Any help would be appreciated.

[Ed Letifov _TechTime - New Zealand_ · Accepted solution]

The doco is wrong.

I believe option 1 meant to read as: find the users, add them to one of both of the confluence-specific groups you've just added.

When a user tries to login into Confluence that is connected to Jira as the user source, the authentication is delegated to Jira, then groups are pulled in, then the resulting groups pf a user are compared to those listed in Confluence's Global Permissions. If any are found there - the use is authorised.

The convoluted doco tries to say – you either bring groups from Jira that Confluence expects by default (confluence-users or confluence-administrators) or you tell Confluence to let a user with Jira-specific groups in. 

For all you care you can configure group-ABC in Global Permissions in Confluence, as long as the user is a member of this – they will be authorized.

[Shaun Penton]

Hi Ed

That makes perfect sense... we only have a few users at present, so that was going to be my workaround in any case.

Thanks for the reply!

Shaun