How do I modify User Directory config with SSO turned on?

Question

I need to change the configuration of the User Directory for Crowd in Jira.  Specifically, I want to enable nested groups.

According to the documentation (https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRA/Configuring+User+Directories) I need to set up an admin user in the Jira internal directory and use that to modify the crowd settings.

But according to this (https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CWD-2535), you can't use accounts in the internal directory if you have SSO enabled.

This seems like a fairly major oversight, since the only way I can see to make this tiny change is to disable SSO (requiring config file changes), restart Jira, make the director config change, then reenable SSO and restart Jira again.

Marcus Silveira · Accepted Answer

Hi Rob,

As you stated, the only way to do this changes through the JIRA UI would be to disable the SSO, use an Internal admin and update the User Directory.

As an alternative for this, we could do this change directly to the database.

You can do this by updating the attribute "ldap.nestedgroups.disabled" to 'false' at the table _cwd_directory_attribute_.

If you have more than one User directory, make sure you update the attribute associated to the correct directory_id.

You'll need to shutdown your application before doing this change.

Please make sure you have a backup of your database before doing any changes to it.

Hope this helps,

Marcus