Stash home directory

What is the Stash home directory?

The Stash home directory is where your Stash data is stored. The home directory location is defined either by the STASH_HOME environment variable, or in the STASH_HOME line of:

• Windows: <Stash installation directory>\bin\setenv.bat
• Linux and Mac: <Stash installation directory>/bin/setenv.sh

 Stash 3.5 and later versions no longer allow the Stash home directory to be the same directory as, or a subdirectory of, the <Stash installation directory>. The Stash home directory, as defined by the STASH_HOME variable, must be in a separate location – Stash will fail on startup otherwise. And by the way, you'll need separate Stash home directories if you want to run multiple instances of Stash (when these are not nodes for a Stash Data Center).

Where possible, you should choose a location for your Stash home directory that will never need to be moved. Some home contents are location-sensitive, so moving the home directory may corrupt them. Stash attempts to update contents when it detects that the home directory has moved, but the safest approach is to avoid the issue altogether by leaving the home directory in the same location.

What does the Stash home directory contain?

Your Stash home directory contains the following directories and files:

Setting the Stash home directory

Note that the Stash home directory is created automatically by the Stash installer – see Getting started.

Only when you are installing Stash from an archive file will you need to set the value of STASH_HOME yourself, as described in this section.

Securing the Stash home directory

The internal database files, the migration dump files and stash-config.properties all contain information that may be considered secret (server settings, salted and hashed user passwords, database passwords, etc).

For production use, we strongly recommend that you secure this directory against unauthorised access. 

We recommend the following precautions:

• Assign a separate restricted user account on the machine for running Stash (not a root/administrator user)
  
  • If you wish to run Stash on port 80, use a separate http front end as described in Integrating Stash with Apache HTTP Server (do not run as root/Administrator if security of the home directory is important to you)
• Ensure that only the user running Stash can access the Stash home directory, and that this user has read, write and execute permissions, by setting file system permissions appropriately for your operating system.

About the repositories

As noted above, data contains the Git repositories being managed by Stash, where "managed by Stash" are the operative words. The repositories are for Stash to interact with, and they are configured and managed accordingly. They are not a mechanism for configuring Stash behaviour. We strongly recommend that customers never modify them, nor interact with them directly. They are intentionally structured in a way which does not lend itself well to direct interaction.

Being Git repositories, there are certainly standard aspects to how the repositories on disk are stored and how they function. However, the exact way they are configured can and does change between Stash releases. Stash makes no effort to preserve unexpected configuration changes which have been applied by customers, and such changes may cause failures at runtime or during upgrades. If there is an aspect of Stash's behaviour you wish to configure, please open a feature request on jira.atlassian.com rather than trying to modify the repositories directly.