Can Crucible use Cloud Crowd for user management?

Question

Hi,

I'm using the cloud versions of JIRA, Confluence, and Bamboo. As far as I know, they all use the cloud version of Crowd for user management so all of the accounts are seamlessly synced between them. In case it's relevant, we're also using Google Apps login with Crowd.

I want to start using Crucible so I started it on my own server and I'm trying to hook it up to the Crowd instance but I can't get it to work. Is this even possible? Also, where is the Crowd Administration Console?

Any recommendation for managing Crucible users with this setup is much appreciated!

Thank you,

Marc

Caspar Krieger · Answer

Atlassian actually used to offer Fisheye/Crucible in the Cloud, but we end of life-d it (and the subversion hosting that came with it) in October 2013 in favour of focussing on Bitbucket Cloud, which (I believe the official line goes) can offer better & faster code reviews (and hosts the code too).

FishEye/Crucible still have a team actively developing them, but a majority of teams inside Atlassian (including my own) moved to Bitbucket for code reviews about 2 years ago (first Cloud as it was more mature, then Server as it needed more dogfooding). Personally speaking, I used to miss some Crucible features but they've largely been added to Bitbucket and so now I think Bitbucket gives a better reviewing experience (Bitbucket Server has some features Cloud doesn't and vice versa, but I know the teams have been working hard on making the experiences similar). I never used FishEye much but I gather Bitbucket does not quite offer the same wealth of stats as FishEye does (though I think cross-repo code search is something that's being actively worked on in Bitbucket).

I don't know what VCS you're using at the moment, but our git site has a guide on migrating from subversion to git (mercurial is also an option for Bitbucket Cloud, but I think it's fairly clear that git has won this DVCS war, so that's what we're encouraging people to use now).

Marc Zych · Answer

Thank you for all the great information!

On a different note: a Cloud version of Crucible would be ideal for me to eliminate hosting maintenance and allow for seamless user management. Are there plans for a Cloud version of Crucible?

Caspar Krieger · Answer

No, unfortunately it's not officially supported to connect non-Cloud products to your Atlassian Cloud userbase; technically speaking it won't work in practice to use the cloud version of Crowd because its APIs are inaccessible to customers for security reasons (e.g. to prevent customers adding System Administrator users and installing untrusted plugins using them).

You might be able to hack together something like your desired configuration using JIRA's REST APIs and Crucible's REST APIs (possibly with an intermediate Crowd server), but such a setup would be unsupported and fragile (we couldn't guarantee that it'd keep working since e.g. JIRA's user APIs may disappear at some point).

A better approach - though it'd require a more substantial development effort - could be to implement the subset of the Crowd server API that Crucible requires as an Atlassian Connect addon for JIRA or Confluence, and point Crucible at that Atlassian Connect server (or implement the same thing as a private service and hardcode valid JIRA credentials, since you'd only need Atlassian Connect for the JIRA credentials it'd give your would-be service). I have not tried this, or heard of it being done, but from my understanding it should be possible, though again unsupported & somewhat fragile.

In terms of our plans: as far as I know (as a developer in the Cloud Identity section of Atlassian), we do not currently have plans to support it officially.

However, making the opposite easy (populating your Atlassian cloud userbase with users from your company's directory) is very high on our list of priorities, which may be of interest to you if you already have an Active Directory server, or a SAML identity provider. If you are in that situation, you can also already sync your userbase to Google Apps, and have your Google Apps userbase sync'd to your Atlassian Cloud.

Alternatively, what we are actively working on is making it possible to unify your Bitbucket Cloud userbase with your Atlassian (JIRA or Confluence or Bamboo) Cloud userbase; if it's possible for you to migrate to Bitbucket Cloud instead then this should help you - though we realise that many companies are not yet able to store their source code in a public cloud for compliance reasons.

(in case it wasn't clear: none of this is an official Atlassian commitment or position - I'm just a developer working in the Cloud Identity area, trying to be helpful 
)