Atlassian JIRA is an enterprise issue-tracker system. One of its key strengths is its ability to adapt to the needs of an organization, right from the frontend of a user interface to providing a platform for add-ons to extend its capabilities. However, understanding its flexibility and picking the right add-ons can often be a daunting task for many administrators. Learning how to take advantage of JIRA's power while keeping the overall design simple and clean is important for the success of its implementation and future growth.
This book is full of useful recipes with real-life JIRA administration challenges, solutions, and examples. Each recipe contains easy-to-follow, step-by-step instructions, and illustrations from the actual application.
Chapter 1, JIRA Server Administration, contains recipes that will help you to administer your JIRA server, including installing, upgrading, and securing JIRA with SSL certificates.
Chapter 2, Fields and Screens, contains recipes that let you customize JIRA with custom fields and screens. This chapter also includes advanced techniques such as using scripts and add-ons to add more control to fields that are not available with JIRA.
Chapter 3, JIRA Workflows, covers one of the most powerful features in JIRA, with recipes that show you how to work with workflows, including permissions and user input validation. This chapter also covers workflow bundling and using scripts to extend out-of-the-box components.
Chapter 4, User Management, explains how users and groups are managed within JIRA. It starts with simple recipes to cover out-of-the-box user management features, and goes on to include topics such as LDAP integration and various single sign-on implementations.
Chapter 5, JIRA Security, focuses on the different security control features offered by JIRA, including different levels of permission and authorization control. This chapter also covers other security-related topics, such as the user password policy and capturing electronic signatures.
Chapter 6, E-mails and Notifications, explains JIRA's e-mail handling system for both outgoing and incoming e-mails. This chapter also covers JIRA's event system and how to extend the basic set of events and templates.
Chapter 7, Integrating with JIRA, covers how to integrate JIRA with other systems, including other Atlassian applications and many other popular cloud platforms, such as Google Drive and GitHub.
Chapter 8, JIRA Administration, covers a broad range of recipes that help to make administrative tasks easier and simpler. It includes problem troubleshooting, task automation, and general scripting.
Chapter 9, JIRA Customizations, covers other user JIRA customization recipes to improve overall usability such as content translation, project cloning, and configuration migration.
For installation and upgrade recipes, you will need to have the latest JIRA 6 distribution, which you can download directly from Atlassian at http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/download.
You may also need several additional software, including the following:
Java SDK: You can get this at http://java.sun.com/javase/downloads
MySQL: You can get this at http://dev.mysql.com/downloads
JIRA 6.x Administration Cookbook is intended for administrators who will be customizing, supporting, and maintaining JIRA for their organizations.
You will need to be familiar with and have a good understanding of JIRA's core concepts. For certain recipes, a basic understanding of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript will also be helpful.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "Take your current JIRA offline, for example, by running the stop jira.bat script."
A block of code is set as follows:
<Connector port="8443" maxHttpHeaderSize="8192" SSLEnabled="true" maxThreads="150" minSpareThreads="25" maxSpareThreads="75" enableLookups="false" disableUploadTimeout="true" acceptCount="100" scheme="https" secure="true" clientAuth="false" sslProtocol="TLS" useBodyEncodingForURI="true"/>
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "Type in the target system's address in the Rules text box."
Feedback from our readers is always welcome. Let us know what you think about this book—what you liked or may have disliked. Reader feedback is important for us to develop titles that you really get the most out of.
To send us general feedback, simply send an e-mail to <[email protected]>, and mention the book title via the subject of your message. If there is a topic that you have expertise in and you are interested in either writing or contributing to a book, see our author guide on www.packtpub.com/authors.
Now that you are the proud owner of a Packt book, we have a number of things to help you to get the most from your purchase.
You can download the example code files for all Packt books you have purchased from your account at http://www.packtpub.com. If you purchased this book elsewhere, you can visit http://www.packtpub.com/support and register to have the files e-mailed directly to you.
Although we have taken every care to ensure the accuracy of our content, mistakes do happen. If you find a mistake in one of our books—maybe a mistake in the text or the code—we would be grateful if you would report this to us. By doing so, you can save other readers from frustration and help us improve subsequent versions of this book. If you find any errata, please report them by visiting http://www.packtpub.com/submit-errata, selecting your book, clicking on the errata submission form link, and entering the details of your errata. Once your errata are verified, your submission will be accepted and the errata will be uploaded on our website, or added to any list of existing errata, under the Errata section of that title. Any existing errata can be viewed by selecting your title from http://www.packtpub.com/support.
Piracy of copyright material on the Internet is an ongoing problem across all media. At Packt, we take the protection of our copyright and licenses very seriously. If you come across any illegal copies of our works, in any form, on the Internet, please provide us with the location address or website name immediately so that we can pursue a remedy.
Please contact us at <[email protected]> with a link to the suspected pirated material.
We appreciate your help in protecting our authors, and our ability to bring you valuable content.
You can contact us at <[email protected]> if you are having a problem with any aspect of the book, and we will do our best to address it.