Usernames with Umlaut characters cannot log in or be deleted in JIRA
Platform Notice: Data Center Only - This article only applies to Atlassian products on the Data Center platform.
Note that this KB was created for the Data Center version of the product. Data Center KBs for non-Data-Center-specific features may also work for Server versions of the product, however they have not been tested. Support for Server* products ended on February 15th 2024. If you are running a Server product, you can visit the Atlassian Server end of support announcement to review your migration options.
*Except Fisheye and Crucible
Symptoms
Users with Umlaut characters in their usernames cannot log in or be deleted in JIRA. There are no errors in the log files.
In the UI, we can see the following "User Does Not Exist" error:
Cause
The Apache Tomcat connector was not configured with UTF-8 encoding.
Resolution
Check the server.xml file found in
$JIRA_INSTALLATION/conf/A standard connector may have the following configuration:
1 2 3 4<Connector port="8080" protocol="HTTP/1.1" connectionTimeout="20000" redirectPort="8443" URIEncoding="UTF-8" />In this case, the URIEncoding has been correctly set to UTF-8.
In this example, the AJP Connector does not have any URIEncoding parameter set:
1<Connector port="8009" protocol="AJP/1.3" redirectPort="8443" />Simply add the URIEncoding parameter like so:
1<Connector port="8009" protocol="AJP/1.3" redirectPort="8443" URIEncoding="UTF-8"/>Once done, restart JIRA and the problem should be fixed.
Was this helpful?