JIRA in your own application server

Recently, Atlassian changed their licensing model so that small development teams can afford to run JIRA. It's only $10 for a year for a team of 10 or less. You can't beat that. So I took the plunge at work and my startup. The standalone version of JIRA starts up without much pain at all. However, if you want to run it with mySQL for example, in your existing Tomcat 6 container, well, you have a little work to do. It took me a number of tries, focusing on the contents of the logs/catalina.out file in my tomcat directory, to figure it out. In the end, I think the documentation on how to set it up is the problem, in that there are so may varables. However, I think it could be really easy by having people post their configuration and just three files.

High level: You really only need to get five key configuration files right. You aren't going to use Tomcat's manager application to deploy JIRA. The edit-webapp directory is where you make changes. During compile, files in this subdirectory are copied to the webapp subdirectory, overwriting whatever is there. The configuration file you will give to tomcat refers to the build directory, so the war file actually gets built in the install hierarchy you download from Atlassian.

I'm ignoring the mySQL setup, which isn't difficult. There is a specific example of how to create the jira user and set her permissions in their standalone documentation regarding tomcat/mysql/linux. Just make note of the username and password, which you need to enter into one of the three key files.

Create a work directory for JIRA, make it world writeable. I suspect it just needs to be tomcat writeable, but haven't verified.

Get the mySQL connector from dev.mysql.com, copy this to the $CATALINA_HOME/lib directory.

If it doesn't exist, create $CATALINA_HOME/conf/Catalina/localhost, make it tomcat writeable.

Get the three files from me that are almost deployment-ready, in one zip file: jiraconf.zip. Extract entityengine.xml, jira-application.properties and jira.xml.

Grab (1)entityengine.xml and (2)jira-application.properties. Place in your jira build /download directory/edit-webapp/WEB-INF/classes* where they are now. Edit the jira-application.properties file to correct the jirahome property. It needs to point to a directory writeable by tomcat at least.

Do a build.

Grab my (3)jira.xml. Copy it to the $CATALINA_HOME/conf/Catalina/localhost directory. Edit it to match your mySQl user that you set up. I missed the last mod here per the instructions, modify the url entry so it reads:

url="jdbc:mysql://localhost/jiradb?autoReconnect=true&useUnicode=true&characterEncoding=UTF8"

Get the jira-jars-tomcat6.zip file from atlassian. Drop the jars into $CATALINA_HOME/lib. Make sure they didn't get placed one level below that, which is easy to do by accident.

Make the one simple change to (4)server.xml in your $CATALINA_HOME/conf directory. All you need to do is add URIEncoding="UTF-8" per the instructions.

Create (5) setenv.sh in $CATALINA_HOME per the instructions.

Stop tomcat. Here is where I delete the existing $CATALINA_HOME/logs/catalina.out just so I don't have to look through lots of stuff. If it fails it will be messy. Start tomcat. Check out catalina.out.

It is very rewarding to watch it make progress. Hopefully this helps someone else. I spent many reboots and jumping around the documentation to figure this out. Let me know if I messed anything up.