Can't add users to groups in Confluence
Asked by Justin Henkel:

When I try to add users to confluence-administrators or confluence-users, it says "could not add user... Check your server logs for more information."

Can anyone tell me which log to check? I'm lost. This is on CentOS 7. I think it's somewhere in /opt/atlassian/confluence/logs.

Confluence is managing users through Active Directory. The group is called "Confluence" and has 3 users in it, all three of which I want to add to other groups. Do I need to add "confluence-users" and "confluence-administrators" to AD?


Answers:
author: Victor Mutambuki
body: Justin,

The default user group should be confluence-users. I think it's easier to manage users in their default groups.

Using the following naming convention is ideal. Please see examples below

* `confluence-users`
* `jira-administrators`
* `jira-core-users, etc.`

To add users to other groups, have the Administrator create the groups where you can add users. The group(s) would then be given permissions in a space to carry out different function.

<https://confluence.atlassian.com/doc/manage-users-151516.html#ManageUsers-Confluenceusermanagement>

Victor

comments: author: Justin Henkel
body: Thanks for the response, Victor.

I renamed the group to "confluence-users" and synced it. I then created "confluence-administrators" in AD, resync'd, and tried to add a user to it. Here's the error I got:

```

??????? at org.springframework.aop.framework.ReflectiveMethodInvocation.proceed(ReflectiveMethodInvocation.java:179)
??????? at org.springframework.aop.framework.JdkDynamicAopProxy.invoke(JdkDynamicAopProxy.java:208)
??????? at com.sun.proxy.$Proxy186.addUserToGroup(Unknown Source)
??????? at com.atlassian.crowd.embedded.atlassianuser.EmbeddedCrowdGroupManager.addMembership(EmbeddedCrowdGroupManager.java:180)
??????? ... 400 more
Caused by: com.atlassian.crowd.exception.ApplicationPermissionException: Did not have update groups permission in any of the directories []
??????? at com.atlassian.crowd.manager.application.ApplicationServiceGeneric.findDirectoryToAddUserToGroupAggregating(ApplicationServiceGeneric.java:1453)
??????? at com.atlassian.crowd.manager.application.ApplicationServiceGeneric.addUserToGroup(ApplicationServiceGeneric.java:1305)
??????? at com.atlassian.crowd.embedded.core.CrowdServiceImpl.addUserToGroup(CrowdServiceImpl.java:757)
??????? ... 415 more
```

It's something to do with permissions, I'm assuming with Active Directory. The account Confluence is logging in from has almost identical rights to the main admin account.

Users aren't able to log in with their Active Directory credentials. When I try I can't either, but the admin account is tied to my email, so I figured it wouldn't work. Should users be able to log in with their Windows network creds?

I guess my next question is how do I verify users and permissions with Active Directory? When I go in "User Directories" and hit sync, it pulls the users in the confluence-users group.


author: Victor Mutambuki
body: Is the AD configuration for the account read only? To manage users in AD, it'll have to be read/write.

Please see the link below for more info  
<https://confluence.atlassian.com/confkb/trying-to-add-confluence-users-to-a-group-throws-group-does-not-allow-updates-error-in-logs-302812802.html>


author: isracodev
body: In my case, I'm using Jira for user management.

So I added a confluence group on Jira and then in Confluence \> Settings \> Users \> User's Directories \> Sync (JIRA SERVER)

Then choose Test to check if everything is ok. And that's all.

Let us know if this works for you.


Tags: active-directory

centos

confluence-server

group

log

server

user