Jira Data Center service won't start
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
Summary
When trying to start Jira's service, it fails with
Job for jira.service failed because the control process exited with error code.
See "systemctl status jira.service" and "journalctl -xeu jira.service" for details.Environment
Jira Data Center running in Linux
Cause
The most likely causes are a configuration mistake in the service configuration - caused, for example, by a directory change in an upgrade - or the the startup shell threw an error.
Solution
There could be several causes for this error, so this is a guideline to help find it:
- To verify the service is set up correctly, check our example at Run Jira Server or Data Center as a systemd service on linux
The referenced commands in the error ("systemctl status jira.service" and "journalctl -xeu jira.service") might help find the configuration issue
- Check the catalina.out log file - if the service configuration is correct, a startup script could have an error. For example:
/opt/vgi/jira/atlassian-jira-software-9.12.12-standalone/bin/catalina.sh: line 523: -Dfile.encoding=utf-8: command not found- The error above indicates that Linux is attempting to run "
-Dfile.encoding=utf-8" as a command. This was caused by a line break in the JVM arguments insetenv.sh
- The error above indicates that Linux is attempting to run "