How do I start a project key with a digit ?

Axonista Accounts January 3, 2017

I have a project name that starts with a digit, e.g. 1000DAYS and I'm trying to set the key to be the same as the project name - as I have done with all the other projects I'm managing in Jira.

I'm getting a validation error and it's not letting me save the project.

How do I fix this so that I can save my project with a key that's correct ?

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Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
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January 3, 2017

You don't.

The project key in JIRA is validated by a regular expression.  You can vary that on server systems, but for various reasons, you should always start the project key with a letter (the default in JIRA is actually letters only, but a lot of us change it to allow numerics and underscores from the 2nd character onwards). 

You can't change the setting on Cloud.  I don't know if Support will do it for you, but if they do, they won't change that "must start with a letter" rule.

Daragh Ward January 3, 2017

Why not ?

This is another example of incredibly poor, careless design that's frustrating me into looking for a new PM tool.

I'm forced to create a key for the project - fine.

But then I'm also forced to set it to something that is not the project name, so it's now inconsistent with the rest of the projects in the system.

I've no problem making it URL-safe or even limiting it to letters, numbers and dashes / underscores, but why on earth can't it start with a digit ???

Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
Community Leader
Community Leader
Community Leaders are connectors, ambassadors, and mentors. On the online community, they serve as thought leaders, product experts, and moderators.
January 3, 2017

It's mostly historical, and not directly the JIRA team's fault.  A number of other systems that can be integrated with JIRA require the key to be of a certain limited format.  Some of them have been updated (possibly all), but there are still chunks of code in add-ons (for both JIRA and other systems) that doesn't cope with it.

There was also the hideous mess caused by people using things other than alphanumerics which were causing so many support issues, at one point Atlassian locked it completely for several versions, and it took a lot to persuade them to allow numerics and the underscore at all.

So, it's not poor JIRA design, it's a combination of historical laziness or assumptions outside JIRA and people trying to be "clever", and causing so much breakage, it needed to be stopped.

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