JIRA Fails to Start due to Could not instantiate appender
Platform Notice: Data Center - This article applies to Atlassian products on the Data Center platform.
Note that this knowledge base article was created for the Data Center version of the product. Data Center knowledge base articles for non-Data Center-specific features may also work for Server versions of the product, however they have not been tested. Support for Server* products ended on February 15th 2024. If you are running a Server product, you can visit the Atlassian Server end of support announcement to review your migration options.
*Except Fisheye and Crucible
Symptoms
JIRA fails to startup and the following appears in the atlassian-jira.log:
log4j:ERROR Could not instantiate appender named "soapdumplog".
log4j:ERROR Could not instantiate class [com.atlassian.jira.logging.MultiTenantJiraHomeAppender].
log4j:ERROR Could not instantiate appender named "filelog".
log4j:ERROR Could not instantiate class [com.atlassian.jira.logging.MultiTenantJiraHomeAppender].
log4j:ERROR Could not instantiate appender named "sqllog".
java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: com.atlassian.jira.logging.MultiTenantJiraHomeAppender
log4j:ERROR Could not instantiate appender named "slowquerylog".Cause
Certain extraction tools have been known to cause issues when uncompressing files with long names. This causes incomplete extractions and will result in JIRA missing essential files to run.
Workaround
- Windows:
- Avoid using Windows' built-in file extraction tool and WinRAR.
A popular and free alternative is 7zip.
- Unix:
- Avoid using Solaris' default tar utility.
- Please use the GNU tar as an alternative when extracting.