In the previous recipes, we looked at how to manually create new user accounts and invite users to create new accounts. These are the two options JIRA administrators have when your JIRA instance is used internally.
However, if your JIRA is set up to be used by the public, such as a support system, you would want to let your customers to freely sign up for a new account, rather than having them to wait for the administrator to manually create each account.
Proceed with the following steps to enable a public user sign up:
- Navigate to Administration | System | General Configuration.
- Click on the Edit Settings button.
- Set the Mode option to Public and click on Update.
JIRA can operate in two modes, public and private. In the private mode, only the administrator can create new user accounts; for example, you can use the private mode for JIRA instances that are used by internal engineering teams to track their projects, as shown in the following screenshot.
The public mode allows anyone to sign up for new accounts. The new accounts created will have normal user permissions (JIRA Users global permission), so they will be able to start using JIRA immediately.
To help prevent spammers, JIRA comes with the CAPTCHA challenge-response feature to make sure there is a real person signing up for a new account and not an automated bot. To enable the CAPTCHA feature, proceed with the following steps:
- Navigate to Administration | System | General Configuration.
- Click on the Edit Settings button.
- Set the CAPTCHA on signup option to On and click on Update.
Once you have enabled CAPTCHA, the Sign up form will include a string of randomly generated alphanumeric characters that must be typed in correctly for a new account to be generated, as shown in the following screenshot:
