Documentation for JIRA 4.3. Documentation for other versions of JIRA is available too.

Install

To install JIRA Standalone on UNIX/Linux, follow these steps:

Before you begin

Please ensure that you have installed Java and set JAVA_HOME.

  • Linux note: Linux distributions frequently have an open-source implementation of Java called GCJ installed. Do not use this — it is incomplete and will cause JIRA to fail in obscure ways.

1. Download and Install JIRA Standalone

  1. Download the JIRA Standalone TAR (.GZ) file here.
  2. Unzip the downloaded file.
    Avoid the Solaris default tar utility! On Solaris, please use GNU tar to unpack JIRA in order to handle long filenames. Do not use the Solaris default tar utility.

2. Set JIRA Home

To specify the location of your JIRA Home Directory, either:
  • Edit the jira-application.properties file (see the JIRA Installation Directory page to find where this file is located), add a 'jira.home' property and set it to your desired location for the JIRA home directory.
  • Set an environment variable named JIRA_HOME in your operating system whose value is the location of your JIRA home directory. To do this, do one of the following:
    • Enter the following command at a shell/console prompt before running JIRA:
      • export JIRA_HOME = /path/to/jira/home
    • Specify the command above in a script used to start JIRA.
You can specify any location on a disk for your JIRA home directory. Please be sure to specify an absolute path.

Please note that you cannot use the same JIRA home directory for multiple instances of JIRA. We recommend locating your JIRA Home Directory completely independently of the JIRA Installation Directory (i.e. not nesting one within the other) as this will minimise information being lost during major operations (e.g. backing up and restoring instances).

3. Start JIRA

A dedicated user should be created to run JIRA, as JIRA runs as the user it is invoked under and therefore can potentially be abused. Here is an example of how to create a dedicated user to run JIRA in Linux/Solaris:

$ sudo /usr/sbin/useradd --create-home --home-dir /usr/local/jira --shell /bin/bash jira

Ensure that only the following directories can be written to by Tomcat:

  • logs
  • temp
  • work
  • database (this directory will be created the first time you run JIRA)
  • your JIRA Home directory

See also Tomcat security best practices

Run bin/startup.sh. Wait until the following message appears in the application's log file:

***************************************************
 You can now access JIRA through your web browser.
***************************************************

To access JIRA, go to your web browser and type this address: http://localhost:8080.

If JIRA does not appear, you may need to change the port that JIRA runs on.

Note: Logs will be written to logs/catalina.out.

If something goes wrong, please verify that Java is installed correctly. If the problem persists, please contact us — we're happy to help.

4. Run the Setup Wizard

See Running the Setup Wizard.

Next Steps

  • See JIRA 101 to start creating Projects, creating Users, and customising your JIRA instance.
  • If you like to set up JIRA Standalone to start automatically every time you restart your computer, please see Starting JIRA Standalone automatically on Linux.
  • By default, JIRA Standalone uses the standard Tomcat port (i.e. 8080). If you need another application to run on that port, either now or in the future, please see Changing JIRA Standalone's port.
  • As part of its installation process, JIRA Standalone automatically installs, configures and connects itself to an HSQLDB database. This is fine for evaluation purposes, however HSQLDB is prone to data corruption. For production installations, we strongly recommend that you connect JIRA to an external database.
  • To get the most out of JIRA, please see Optimising Performance.



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