What are the project key and plan key used for and how should they be chosen?

[sseike]

This question is in reference to Atlassian Documentation: Creating a plan

You have to enter a project key and plan key at the very beginning and you give no information - none whatsoever - in your entire website as far, as I can tell - about what they are how they should be chosen.  Apparently, these things are tricky to change once created, so you would think there would be at least a bit of information and guidance for what to enter for them.  Are they treated like primary keys in a database?  (I kind of suspect this, since your UIs seem to have been designed by relational database engineers with a penchant of massive amounts of schema normalization.)  Do they need to be unique within a company's account?  Should they be understandable to users or will they rarely be seen? An simplistic example ("Eg. WEB (for a plan named Website)") is not the same as a useful explanation here.

[rsperafico · Accepted solution]

Hello Stephen,

Thank you for your inquire.

Project Key and Plan Key are shorter to Project Name and Plan Name, so instead of searching for "Website" as plan name, you can search by plan key (i.e.: WEB).

Please, refer to the following documentation so you can have a better understanding on what they are and where they are used:

• Locating important directories and files
  
• Bamboo variables

If you find this answer useful, I would kindly ask you to accept it so the same will be visible to others who might be facing the same issue you have inquired.

Thank you for your understanding.

—

Kind regards,
Rafael P. Sperafico
Atlassian Support

[sseike]

Thank, Rafael. So, I guess the bottom line is that these keys are used as directory names in Bamboo's file system, so they need to be unique for an installation of Bamboo and they have certain character restrictions.