Access jira from the wild for vendor support plugins

[david felch]

We would like to expose our Atlassian suite to wild so we are able to have vendor plugins like workotter and amazon.  currently the suite is only accessed by being on our network and having an AD account to login the sites.  We would like to also setup where people are able to access the site from outside our network and still use AD account to login so vendors can support there plugins?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

There's two parts to this.

The first one is that you need to expose your JIRA to the outside world.  This is a networking question really, and there are all sorts of ways you could do it.  You do need to talk to your network people about it, as they probably have rules about access and standardised ways to do it.  But to get you started, a common configuration (especially for smaller systems and organisations) is a simple url within your public site that is a proxy to JIRA.  For example, if you go to https://yourcompany and have a browse around, you are probably looking at a "static" set of web pages.  You can set up a proxy quite easily to catch https://yourcompany/jira and make the web-server go "oh, I need to go ask http://yourinternaljirasystem/jira for that data" instead of a static web page.

The second part is the user logins.  The most simple case for you is to add users into your Active Directory.  I know that may not be appropriate, so the next most simple case is to use the internal directory for users you don't want in AD.  Later versions of JIRA (6.2+ if memory serves) can have multiple directories, so when a user logs in, it checks your AD first, then if it can't find a match there, it will look in the internal directory (this has the advantage that you're only letting them into JIRA, no other systems)