Prevent jira plugin from being disabled and/or uninstalled

[Anders Hammar]

I'm developing a Jira plugin/add-on that will be core to our Jira installation. As such, I'd like to prevent it from being disabled and possibly event uninstalled. How can I do that?

I've found this discussion:

https://ecosystem.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/UPM/pages/6094862/UPM+system+and+prevent+disabling+options

But haven't been able to find the resulting solution. My plugin is version 2 (OSGI).

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

It is possible to tell the system a plugin is a "system" add-on, but this should only be done if absolutely necessary. 

These add-ons can still be disabled, but not removed from the UI.

However, I would strongly recommend that you never write an add-on that does this.  There's no good reason I can think of for writing an add-on that can't be disabled, and as an admin, I would never install anything that did that because of the potential to render my system unusable and/or unmaintainable.

[Anders Hammar]

Thanks for responding. The thing is that we have very strict requirements on auditing user actions which includes admins. So either I have to implement additional audit logging if an admin does disable or uninstall the plugin, or (which seems easier) just prevent this.

So one solution would be this "system" flag, but based on the docs I found it is only available for non-osgi plugins. But refering to the link I posted there might be a better/newer way available.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Add/remove add-on goes into the audit log.  But it doesn't really matter how strict your audits are, there are always ways for a full admin to hide activities, by the nature of their role, they have access to do it. 

[Anders Hammar]

The plugin I'm developing adds our specific auditing as the existing audit log doesn't fit our requirements.

In any case, regardless if I should or shouldn't, there is no way to prevent a plugin from being disabled? The comments in the end of the link I posted (from 2010!) suggests that there would be some support for this in UPM. 

[Danyal Iqbal]

there are no feasable options as far as I know.

As such, I'd like to prevent it from being disabled and possibly event uninstalled.

You dont want to implement this in the plugin, you need to control user rights to accomplish this.