Is project ID and Project key are they same

[Gladwin James]

Hi Team,

I am entirely from a differnt product. I would greatly appreciate if you could help.

I would like to know if the project ID and the project key are the same in Jira. I am closely working with a client of mine, and we would like to get an understanding if the project ID and project key are different. Can you share the purpose they share; we have gone through a couple of articles, and Google AI generated the explanation, but it would be great if we could get an answer from the expert.

Thanks in Advance.

[Rune Rasmussen · Accepted solution]

They are two different things, though they both identify an individual project.
So they sort of serve the same purpose.

The Project ID is a numerical value like 123456, and the Project Key can be both letters and numbers.

So your Human Resourced Project can have ID 123456 and Key HR.
The Key will be used to prefix every Issue or Request. HR-1, HR-2, and so on.

The Project Key can be changed, but the ID cannot.

[Gladwin James]

Simply wow! Your explanation gave me an insight into how the values would look without even making me go beyond. Thank you tons! 

[Thierry PELERIN · Accepted solution]

hi, ID and Key are different.

On a project : the Key is available in Project seetings, and can be updated (not expected to be :) ). It's more or less a functionnal Key

The ID is the real Technical ID of a project inside ther Data base (primary Key).

Do not hesitate to use jira API on your own project and you will see the difference :) 

[Gladwin James]

Thank you, Thierry. That was helpful regarding the API call suggestion. We will definitely give it a go.

[Mikael Sandberg · Accepted solution]

Hi @Gladwin James,

Welcome to Atlassian Community!

No, project Id and project key are two separate identifier. The easiest way to find the project Id is to go into an issue in the project and click on the three-dot menu up in the right hand corner and select Export to XML. In the XML you will see something like this:

<project id="12345" key="ITSM">IT</project> 

[Gladwin James]

Thank you so much, Mikael. Very much appreciated. The instruction to access the specific was very clear.

[Martin Hilbig _GC Gruppe_]

I would argue the easiest way is to call the project endpoint:

your.jiradomain.tld/rest/api/latest/project/<projectkey>

will return a json response with your project ID in the form: "id": "XXXXX" 

[Danno]

@Gladwin James the project ID is a reference number to a project in your system that isn't visible to the user. The Project key is the visible reference to that same project. Since you're just getting started the Project key is the most useful since it is part of every issue key in that project.

See this article for more info.:

Edit a project's details