Can JIRA pull authentication from Tomcat authentication realm?

Question

I am dealing with developers who have created a authentication realm that they use for a Tomcat application. They are wondering if we can bring up a separate Tomcat instance with that same code for authentication and host JIRA within that. Is this possible and if so, how is it done?

Kevin Buchs2 · Answer

Timothy,

Thank you for your response. I don't claim much knowledge in this area, but I have the impression that the authentication realm the developer was asking about is not a SSO implementation. I believe it is providing authentication against a common SAML database. So, I don't think the idea is to be pre-authenticated by the time you arrive at the Jira URL, but rather to have the Tomcat authentication realm provide the username/password confirmation. Unfortunately, due to politics beyond my control, I can't directly ask the developers at this time.

Timothy · Answer

You will have to write your own custom authenticator to do this (https://docs.atlassian.com/atlassian-seraph/latest/sso.html). Of if you can pass the basicAuth into the request going into JIRA, that would work too.