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GitLab self-hosted and Jira Cloud: why the official integration does not work

Short answer: the official app is pull-based, and your GitLab is not reachable from Atlassian's cloud. Nothing you configure will change that.

If you run GitLab CE or EE self-managed and the official GitLab for Jira Cloud app never finishes connecting — or connects and then silently stops linking commits — you are not doing it wrong. Public reviews of that app are full of the same report: "broken for self-managed instances", "impossible to configure with a self-managed instance", "trying to get it working with a self-hosted version for two months".

Why the official app cannot work with self-hosted Git

The official connectors are pull-based: Atlassian's cloud has to reach your Git server's API to fetch commits and merge requests. That requires your server to be reachable from the public internet.

A self-hosted Git server behind a corporate firewall is, by design, not reachable from the outside. So the integration cannot complete — no matter how the tokens, scopes or webhooks are configured. It is not a misconfiguration on your side, and no support ticket will fix it. It is the direction of the connection.

What has to change

Reverse the direction. BastionTrail is push-based: your Git server sends an outbound webhook to us when something happens. Corporate servers almost always have outbound access even when they have no inbound access at all — which is why this works where pull does not.

  • No inbound port, no VPN, no agent installed on your infrastructure.
  • We hold no credentials to your Git server. You paste a URL and a secret into your own webhook settings; nothing is delegated to us.
  • In Jira, the app asks for a single read scope. It never writes to your issues.

And then it becomes evidence

Once the events flow, BastionTrail assembles the chain auditors ask for: commit → merge request → who approved it → deployment to production. Exportable as CSV or a printable PDF, with Segregation-of-Duties detection (it flags a change approved by its own author) and a completeness score. The trail is hash-chained, so any edit breaks verification at the exact entry.

Install free on the Atlassian Marketplace

The connector is free with no user limit. Audit trail reports are the paid plan, with a 30-day trial. Security overview · Privacy

BastionTrail

The Git-to-Jira connector that works behind your firewall — and turns every deploy into an exportable audit trail.

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