How to use project roles to define licensed jira users?

Question

I'm not sure if this is possible, but I'm looking to see if there is a way that I can setup Jira so that when a person gets set into a project role, then that person will essentially get the "JIRA Users" license head count without having to put them in the jira-users (or any other group with JIRA Users Permissions).

The situation I have is that we are setting JIRA up across multiple development departments that each have their own projects and teams.  I don't want to have to manually administer each of their projects when they have people they want to add or remove.  Each project has a project administrator that can add people to roles.  I would like for them to just handle the project roles and users to be able to log into jira if they just belong to a project role.  We don't want to give each project administrator JIRA admin rights.  We are also using AD, so all users are already in the system, just without any groups or roles.  Our AD admins will not allow us to create groups though and then manage them.

Any solutions?

Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted Answer

Not without amending the core of Jira.  The rule is not quite "must be in group", it's "user can log in", but that is effectively locked to "must be in a group that is flagged for counting as a login".

I do see the logic of your scenario, I think.  In Jira terms, you'd like people to have accounts with no groups, until they're added to a role by a project admin.

It's a bit torturous, but I can sort of see a workaround that avoids core coding too.  Continue with the AD stuff as it is (no groups etc), and the project admins as they are.  What I'm thinking is that when a user is added to a role, there *might* be a "user event" fired.  If that is right, you could write a Listener plugin that could catch those events, look at the user profile, and if they're not in a login group, add them into one.  You'd probably want to catch "removed from role" too, which would automatically remove unused users.