Importing users from Confluence to Jira

Kevin Barker

We have been running a Confluence wiki for about a year, using the internal user directory serving approximately 200 user accounts. We are now considering adding Jira into the mix, but would really like not having to recreate our user accounts manually one by one. We know about Atlassian Crowd, but feel it's probably overkill for our needs.

Is there an automated way to import our Confluence user directory into Jira so we can use Jira as the shared user repository?

Kevin Barker

I managed to do something like what I was after, using a combination of the Atlassian CLI tools and some plain SQL queries. The Atlassian CLI tool for Jira has an "addUsersWithFile" action which imports users from a CSV file in the format:

user_name,password,email_address,display_name,group[,group[,group...]]

So I kludged together some SQL queries in a bash script to extract the necessary user info from the Confluence database and output it in the required CSV format, then used the Jira import action to add the users. This seems to have worked, inasmuch as I can see that the users and groups have imported, and all users can login to Confluence using the Jira User Directory for authentication. This method doesn't retain the original user passwords so all users need to reset their login, but that's not too onerous.

Note that having multiple user directories configured (e.g. Jira User Directory and Confluence Internal Directory) requires that you don't have the same username in both directories. So after transferring the users using this method, you need to either disable the Internal Directory in Confluence, or alter all the original usernames in the Confluence Internal Directory database so they don't clash with the newly created users in the Jira User Directory. (I manually updated the Confluence database appending ".conf-directory" to the usernames in the Internal Directory).

We're still in the testing phase of this, but it seems to have achieved what we were hoping for.