Documentation for JIRA 4.1. Documentation for other versions of JIRA is available too.
A JIRA group is a convenient way to manage a collection of users. Users can belong to many groups. Groups are used throughout JIRA; for example, they can:
* Project roles are somewhat similar to groups, the main difference being that group membership is global whereas project role membership is project-specific.
On this page:
When you install JIRA, three groups are automatically created:
You can create and delete groups according to your organisation's requirements.
If you are using External User Management, you will not be able to create, delete or edit groups or group membership from within JIRA; and 'Automatic Group Membership' (see below) will not apply. However, you can still assign groups to project roles.
To see what groups exist, and where they are used:
The 'Filter Group' form restricts the list of groups shown to those that match the 'Name Contains', with a specified maximum per page. Click the 'Filter' button to refresh the list with the restricting filter.
To create a group, enter the new group 'Name' in the 'Add Group' form in the 'Group Browser' (see 'Viewing groups' above) and click the 'Add Group' button.
To delete a group, click the 'Delete' link for that group in the 'Group Browser' (see 'Viewing groups' above). The confirmation screen that follows explains that users will be removed from the group through its deletion. Be aware of the impact this may have on users in that group. For example, if that group membership was the sole conveyor of a permission for a user, then the user will no longer have that permission.
Before deleting a group it is recommended that you check whether the groups is being used by any permission schemes, email notification schemes, issue security levels or saved filters. See 'Viewing groups' (above).
To edit a group's membership, click the 'Edit Members' link in the row for that group in the 'Group Browser' (see 'Viewing groups' above). This takes you to a form allowing you to add users to or remove them from the group.
If the group has the 'JIRA System Administrators' global permission, you cannot edit its membership unless you have the 'JIRA System Administrators' global permission.
If you have a user limited license (e.g. personal license) and have reached your user limit, you will not be able to assign any further users to groups with login permissions (i.e. jira-users permission) without first reducing the number of users with login permissions.
To automatically add newly-created users to a particular group, grant the group the 'JIRA Users' global permission.
To do this, navigate to the 'Administration' section and select 'Global Permissions' from the 'Global Settings' menu. Add the 'JIRA Users' permission to the relevant group, as described in 'Granting global permissions'.