Atlassian and LDAP

Atlassian allows you to use your existing LDAP directory service to authenticate to their products. If you are using more than one (like jira and confluence), I definitely recommend getting crowd.

Crowd is simply a ‘single sign-on’ tool. Essentially it allows you to use a single user database to log in to all your Atlassian services. If you already use an LDAP service, you may not need this, but it certainly makes things easier. Unsecured LDAP is a breeze to configure, but the Java based Atlassian services are a bit cryptic when it comes to LDAPS. Crowd makes this easier to manage, as you only have to worry about ssl certificates and java in one place. It also makes it easy to drill down access groups and such, so you can limit what users have access.

If you want to configure SSL, be prepared to go to the CLI and configure a certificate store. I’ll provide some more information on that later.

We started out using OpenLDAP and then we transitioned to Open Directory. As usual, the thing to remember is that Open Directory uses a modified version of OpenLDAP, so most things can be easily modified to work.