Exception During Upgrade to JIRA 6.x Fails due to NullPointerException

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Symptoms

Upgrading to JIRA 6.x seemingly completes but fails when starting up and the following appears in the atlassian-jira.log:

2013-06-30 14:51:16,114 localhost-startStop-1 ERROR      [atlassian.jira.upgrade.UpgradeManagerImpl] Exception thrown during upgrade: java.lang.NullPointerException
com.atlassian.util.concurrent.LazyReference$InitializationException: java.lang.NullPointerException
	at com.atlassian.util.concurrent.LazyReference.getInterruptibly(LazyReference.java:149)
	at com.atlassian.util.concurrent.LazyReference.get(LazyReference.java:112)
	at com.atlassian.util.concurrent.ResettableLazyReference.get(ResettableLazyReference.java:87)
	at com.atlassian.jira.issue.fields.CustomFieldImpl.getCustomFieldSearcher(CustomFieldImpl.java:1807)
	at com.atlassian.jira.issue.fields.CustomFieldImpl.<init>(CustomFieldImpl.java:249)
	at com.atlassian.jira.issue.fields.CustomFieldImpl.<init>(CustomFieldImpl.java:222)
	at com.atlassian.jira.issue.managers.DefaultCustomFieldManager$CustomFieldCache.cloneCustomFields(DefaultCustomFieldManager.java:730)
	at com.atlassian.jira.issue.managers.DefaultCustomFieldManager$CustomFieldCache.getAllCustomFields(DefaultCustomFieldManager.java:717)
	at com.atlassian.jira.issue.managers.DefaultCustomFieldManager$CopyOnWriteCustomFieldCache.getAllCustomFields(DefaultCustomFieldManager.java:621)
	at com.atlassian.jira.issue.managers.DefaultCustomFieldManager.getAllCustomFields(DefaultCustomFieldManager.java:417)
	at com.atlassian.jira.issue.managers.DefaultCustomFieldManager.getCustomFieldObjects(DefaultCustomFieldManager.java:412)
	at com.atlassian.jira.upgrade.tasks.UpgradeTask_Build6045.getCustomFields(UpgradeTask_Build6045.java:132)
	at com.atlassian.jira.upgrade.tasks.UpgradeTask_Build6045.doUpgrade(UpgradeTask_Build6045.java:59)
	at com.atlassian.jira.upgrade.UpgradeManagerImpl.doUpgradeTaskSuccess(UpgradeManagerImpl.java:673)
	at com.atlassian.jira.upgrade.UpgradeManagerImpl.runUpgradeTasks(UpgradeManagerImpl.java:526)
	at com.atlassian.jira.upgrade.UpgradeManagerImpl.doUpgrade(UpgradeManagerImpl.java:456)
...
Caused by: java.lang.NullPointerException
	at com.atlassian.jira.util.JiraUtils.loadComponent(JiraUtils.java:96)

Cause

The JIRA instance has plugins installed that are not compatible with the new JIRA version.

Resolution

  1. Stop JIRA.
  2. Rename the $JIRA_HOME/plugins/installed-plugins to something else, for example tmp. This effectively prevents all your plugins from starting up when JIRA starts.
  3. Start JIRA and retry the upgrade.
  4. Once the upgrade has successfully completed, reinstall all the previous plugins through the Add-on Manager. This will automatically install versions that are compatible with the new JIRA version.
Last modified on Mar 30, 2016

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