Access Jira Externally

[Jo]

Hi,

I'm interested in documentation/recommendations on how I can allow JIRA to be accessed externally. By externally I mean allowing an IP which is not in my office network to access it . Currrently for people in my company to access it they have to either be in the office or use a VPN connection. 

Any and all advice much appreciated.

[john.tufts@bluestone.com.au]

You could try running the cloud version of JIRA instead, then you can access from anywhere without any networking.

[Jack Jone]

I believe this is independent of a TestRail edition and works with both TestRail Server/Cloud (as this only uses TestRail’s API). I’m not so sure about the JIRA edition though, as it also requires server-side Perl scripts from my understanding and this might only work if you have full control over JIRA and use JIRA Server. Regards, Toshiba Support

[petry]

You can either change the port directly in your Tomcat configuration files or, if you're not confortable exposing Tomcat directly to the internet, you can configure a proxy in front of JIRA, as Apache for example.

Note that you'd also need to configure access permission in your firewall to allow outside connections to your application, the exact steps to it may variate depending on your network infraestruture.

Hope it helps!

Cheers,
Andre 

[Leena Bakshi]

Thanks Andre. Your answer was the most helpful one here as I am in the same boat as the original requestor and now know about the prepwork. 

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

That's a networking question, rather than JIRA.

To connect to JIRA on a server, you just need a network route to it.  As you say it's internal (local or via VPN), then your network is currently set to allow people internally to it.  You need to talk to your network team to get them to configure the network to allow people outside it to get to that server.

That all depends on your networks, firewalls, routing and so-on.  From our end, we can't really help you, as we don't know what you've got.

[Jo]

I was afraid of that answer :). I dont have a networok team to consult over it anymore ..so I am trying to find as much information I can to read on how Jira gets configured to allow access generally.. any recommendation?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Not a lot. Jira is running ok on your network, so it's running. The issue is in the routing - you just need to get "external" access routed through to Jira (allowing http or https access). That applies on any network. Mostly, people in your situation will have a gateway - something that external websites run. If you can run JIRA on that, it'll work, but it's a bad idea in security and load terms, it is far better to have the gateway act as a proxy (e.g. user lands on https://yoursite.com/jira, and the gateway knows to go "oh, route that over to the Jira server internally) However, the corporate and security policies on this are not my field - I've always been able to ask the network teams in big places, or talk nicely to the gateway owner on smaller sites.

[malutanpetronel]

Hi Jo !

I am wondering if you can share your solution with me !
I am also alone and I did tried now for a few days to allow JIRA to be accessed from internet without success ! I was able to see JIRA on http://localhost:8080 and http://external_ip:8080 on the VPS I am talking about, but  http://external_ip:8080 cannot be accessed even after I did put down firewall and iptables on that machine (of course only after installation).

S(h)ame dried answers from Atlassian team "we don't know what you get !"

I would be glad if you can share with me your solution ! Thank you !

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

The "dried answers" you are getting from Atlassian are because this problem is not an Atlassian problem

JIRA is running on your machine.  You need to set up your network to allow external access.  I very much doubt Jo's network set up is identical to yours.

You say you can see JIRA on http://external_ip:8080 which is fine, now you need to fix your network so that it can be seen from whereever else you need to see it from.