Crowd Install Question
Asked by Rob DeVries:

Hello,

I am currently running Jira and Confluence on a self hosted windows server.

One thing which has been bugging me is having to login all the time when switching from one to the other.

I see that there is a product which allows a single sign on.

Since I have both Jira and Confluence am I going to have an issue when installing Crowd?

The reason I ask is, from what I was reading Crowd will install Tomcat. Tomcat is already installed due the previous installs. I am just worried about messing something up when I have things running.

Is there anything which I should be aware of before I do this install?

Thank you,


Answers:
author: Andy Heinzer
body: Hi Rob,

I see you are looking into using Crowd as a means for single sign on for both Jira and Confluence. While Crowd can certainly be helpful as a means to manage accounts for Jira and Confluence in a single location, and it can also provide single sign on, I am curious to see if maybe we can delve a little deeper into your concerns here.

First off, about installing tomcat, this is java web server that all three products will install (jira, confluence, and crowd). Just because tomcat might be already installed, installing a new product will create its own tomcat version that has been bundled specifically to work with that product on that version. It's not a problem to have multiple tomcat versions on the same machine, it's actually very common when running multiple applications on the same operating system.

I don't mean to discourage your interest in Crowd here, however from your description of the need to constantly login to both Jira and Confluence, and the detail that these are both on the same server, I can't help but think that you might be affected by a known limitation where the Jira/Confluence cookie can get overwritten in your browser just by visiting the other site. Please see the KB [User is constantly logged out of JIRA](https://confluence.atlassian.com/jirakb/user-is-constantly-logged-out-of-jira-192872663.html). From that KB:
> This problem is most often caused by the cookie being overwritten when accessing JIRA, Confluence or potentially any other applications with a web-login on the same domain or IP, such as with the below configuration:
>
> * **JIRA:** http://atlasserver:8080/
> * **Confluence:** http://atlasserver:8090/
>
> As the cookies are not distinguished by the port number, the browser will overwrite the previous cookie and it will appear as if the user has been logged out of the previous application. Given that this is browser-specific, it will not be visible within the application logs.

The resolution section has lots of possible solutions here. Installing Crowd is one of them, but there are other solutions as well such as setting up each application to use a context path, or using a reverse proxy to give each application it's own subdomain address instead. Just something to consider.

I hope this helps.

Andy

comments: author: Rob DeVries
body: Hi Andy,

Thank you for the reply.  
With Tomcat, I had an issue with a SVN and database configuration tool install which caused a lot of issues which I did not want to repeat. I have Jira and Confluence running and I don't want to break it.

Single sign in is really my main though when I saw crowd. Some other thoughts and issues I had/have are setting up a Confluence space which I can use for a document repository, but all the files are located in a directory on the server. With this I could then place all the documents in revision control or add documents on the fly without having to update the Confluence space all the time. (The Atlassian Companion could help here) Jira and Confluence are new to me and I find that I need to change how I do things to make it fit in the framework, so I keep looking for addons which are available to help. This has other side effects. Sorry for the side note and off topic.

What I am not looking for is another program which I have to maintain and figure out. I will have a look at the link and hopefully I can find something that will fix the login issue.

Thank you for the help,  
Rob


Tags: confluence

confluence-server

jira

jira-server

server