Protect Jira with an wildcard SSL Certificate

Question

Currently we have Jira Service desk (v4.8.0) and Jira Software (v8.8.0) running on our on prem server.

Both are for internal use only and not for external use. There is an issue where Internet browsers such as IE or Chrome think this is a HTTPS site, redirects the user and then because it isn't a SSL protected site the page is inaccessible and the only fix has been to clear the browsing history from the users machine. I have also managed to run the "config.bat" file and confirmed that it is only to use HTTP traffic, I spotted there was an option to force HTTP traffic to HTTPS but that wasn't enabled annoyingly.

To get around this issue and to protect our site, I want to use our pre purchased Wildcard SSL certificate, but I cannot find any simple way enforcing SSL and applying the certificate.

As I don't want to affect live services I have setup a VM and installed JIRA as a practice environment to test first.

Can anyone point me in the right direction on how I can use our Wildcard SSL cert? I was hoping I could do this within IIS but looks like it uses Tom Cat which I am not familiar with.

Tom Wealthy · Answer

Hi Dave,

Thanks for coming back to me so quickly! Sorry if I wasn’t very clear on my intentions but thankfully you have interpreted what I meant 🙂

That’s an interesting way of achieving this and something I am more familiar with so I shall read the documentation you have linked carefully and hopefully I’ll achieve what im after!

I can’t believe how much of an effort it is to protect the site using SSL and having to go through all of this, seems a pretty basic task in this day of age, but it must be like this for very good reason im sure!

Dave Theodore [Coyote Creek Consulting] · Answer

I'm having some trouble following exactly what the issue is, but it sounds like you want Jira to use SSL and you already have a wildcard cert.  Assuming I'm right, my recommendation would be to use a reverse proxy server. Atlassian has documentation on how to do this with IIS (check the link.)

Most likely you can skip the part about the context. You don't need it if you want your URL to be something like: https://jira.domain.com  If you want the URL to be something like: https://atlassian.domain.com/jira you will use the context.