Configure JIRA as service on Mac OS X

Installing JIRA on Mac OS X

On this page

Still need help?

The Atlassian Community is here for you.

Ask the community

Apple Mac OS X is not a supported operating system for the JIRA server, as JIRA is only tested against Oracle JDK and JRE (formerly Sun JDK and JRE).
Please note: This does not affect your JIRA end users, who can still use Mac OS X with any of the supported browsers.

If you want to run JIRA as a server on OSX, you will need to configure it to load as a userdaemon. OSX has migrated configuration scripts from services such as cron, rc, or init.d to the launchd utility. There are some good introductory and in-depth explanations of it's function on the web. You can find out more about launchd here:

http://developer.apple.com/macosx/launchd.html

It's easier to use Lingon (http://lingon.sourceforge.net/) to define your plist xml definitions for import into launchd; although because launchd does not permit forking of processes you will need to call $TOMCAT_HOME/bin/catalina.sh directly.

Example definition of com.atlassian.jira.plist:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN"
"http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
         <key>Label</key>
         <string>com.atlassian.jira</string>
         <key>ProgramArguments</key>
         <array>

<string>/usr/local/apache-tomcat-5.5.23/bin/catalina.sh</string>
                 <string>run</string>
         </array>
         <key>RunAtLoad</key>
         <true/>
         <key>ServiceDescription</key>
         <string>JIRA autoloaded as a service</string>
         <key>UserName</key>
         <string>pw</string>
</dict>
</plist>

I'd advise adding the <UserName> tag to tell OSX which user to run Tomcat under, eg running Tomcat under root is not recommended. JAVA_HOME will be inherited as an environment variable for whichever user you define in the XML definition - so configure it for that user's .profile in their home directory.

If you wanted to run JIRA as a WAR web-archive, and use OSX's factory install of Tomcat, please see the JIRA WAR installation instructions.

Last modified on Sep 28, 2012

Was this helpful?

Yes
No
Provide feedback about this article
Powered by Confluence and Scroll Viewport.