Purpose

When working on customization tasks, it is often beneficial to directly update JSP pages in Jira with a custom content. However, upon modifying the respective JSP template, the changes are not reflected in Jira even after the service has been restarted.

Solution

Jira is bundled with Tomcat application server that has a way of caching JSP pages on the fly and persisting this cache between application restarts. The easiest solution would be to remove JSP pages from the caching completely, which will make editing them easier as changes will be automatically reflected even without the service restart.

To remove specific JSP pages from caching the following files needs to be modified: JIRA_INSTALL/atlassian-jira/WEB-INF/web.xml

For example, to be able to modify login.jsp, comment out the following servlet-mapping:

<!--<servlet-mapping>
<servlet-name>jsp.login_jsp</servlet-name>
<url-pattern>/login.jsp</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>-->

Restart your Jira service after that change, and after that any changes to login.jsp should be automatically reflected without the service restart.