Automate Active Directory connection with Ansible

[John Kennedy]

Is it possible to use Ansible to connect my new Jira instance to Active Directory? We are looking at providing a managed services offering which would include a management plane build. We want to automate as much of the build as possible - The infrastructure will be built on AWS using Terraform (that is how we are installing Jira) and then use Ansible for final configuration.

I can't find anything/anyone who has done this before.

[Daniel Eads · Accepted solution]

Hi John,

Interesting question! I know there are several resources out there for deploying Jira with docker and kubernetes (both images and helm charts exist). I haven't seen resources for final configuration with Ansible or chef.

The tricky bit here is that the user directory information is stored in the database. If you're just adding a node, you wouldn't need to configure the user directories, which is why there are no examples of this around despite the other deployment information. There's no REST API endpoints for adding new user directories either; it's all done through the web interface normally.

What I might suggest is taking a look at the cwd_directory table in the database and considering what a scripted record might look like (inspecting the table on a Jira that already has an LDAP user directory configured would be a good reference). There is some risk in the database schema changing between major Jira versions so I'm not sure I'd go as far as to say this is a good solution, but it's a potential option. Adding rows to the database manually isn't something you really want to do if you can avoid it, but in this case I think your only other option would be using an automated browser tool like Selenium to try and make the same clicks and form entries that a real user would in the web interface.

Cheers,
Daniel