Symptoms

When you change the JIRA Home Directory in the jira-application.properties, the JIRA Home Directory is not changed and is still using the old directory.

Cause

There are 2 ways to define the JIRA Home directory for Jira

1. Using the JIRA_HOME environment variable
2. Using the jira.home property

As mentioned in the Setting your JIRA Home Directory documentation

There are multiple ways to set the JIRA_HOME environment variable as well as multiple ways to set the jira.home property. Some methods to set the JIRA_HOME environment variable will override others, and likewise for setting the jira.home properties. However, the JIRA_HOME environment variable will always take precedence over the jira.home property.

For example, a JIRA_HOME environment variable defined in the setenv.sh will override the JIRA_HOME environment variable defined at the shell/console prompt before running Jira. Another example is a jira.home web context property defined in your application server overrides the value of the jira.home property defined in your jira-application.properties file.

This is the order of JIRA home directory configurations according to priority

1. JIRA_HOME="/path/to/jira/home" (setenv.sh)

2. JIRA_HOME="/path/to/jira/home" (configured in your operating system)

3. <Parametername="jira.home"value="c:/jira/home"/> (server.xml)

4. jira.home = /path/to/jira/home (jira-application.properties)

This means JIRA home directory configured in setenv.sh will override all other JIRA home directory configurations. JIRA home configured in the operating system will override server.xml and jira-application.properties and so on.

Resolution

If configuring jira-application.properties doesn't work, check the other configuring options which takes precedence and make sure that none of them are configured.

To check the environment configured in operating system, run the following command

Ubuntu : env

Windows: set

And make sure that the JIRA_HOME environment is not configured