After you have installed JIRA (or have deployed JIRA WAR to your application server) and have accessed its URL (eg. http://<jira-server-name>:8080 or http://<jira-server-name>:8080/jira) for the first time, you will be presented with a brief Setup Wizard to configure JIRA.

On this page:

Step 1 of 4: Database Configuration

The first page of the Setup Wizard is shown below.

Choose the language you would like the JIRA user interface to appear in by selecting the preferred Server Language.

(info) Please Note:

On this page you can choose between connecting JIRA to:

Connecting to an External Database

If you choose to connect JIRA to an external database (by clicking the External radio button), you will be presented with a number of database configuration options.

(info) Your external database must be a newly-created (or empty) database. For more information on creating a database, refer to step 2 (for creating/configuring a database) of the appropriate documentation for your database:

To configure your external database connection:

  1. Choose the type of database server (running your new JIRA database) in the Database Type field. Your database configuration options will change depending on your chosen Database Type.
  2. The fields on this page of the Setup Wizard are identical to those on the JIRA Configuration Tool (included with all JIRA distributions except JIRA WAR) when configuring your database connection. For details on configuring these fields for your external database, refer to step 3 of section 4.1 (Using the JIRA Configuration Tool) of the appropriate documentation:

(warning) Please Note:

Step 2 of 4: Application Properties

On this page you can configure some of JIRA's settings and enter your license key. For more details on the settings and what they mean, see Configuring JIRA Options.

JIRA will store your automated backups, file attachments and indexes within your JIRA Home Directory.

(info) If you have an existing XML backup of a JIRA site, you can import it into your new JIRA installation at this point by clicking the top import your existing data link. If you choose this option, please note the following points:

License Key

You are required to enter a valid license key before you can use JIRA. You can obtain an evaluation license key which will allow JIRA to run unrestricted for 30 days. To use your existing license key or obtain a new license key, follow the steps below:

  1. Do either of the following:
  2. Once you have either created an account or logged in with an existing account, the Licenses page will appear.
    (info)If you logged in with an existing account, a list of your existing Atlassian product licenses will be shown. If you do not have any existing JIRA licenses, generate a new one by:
  3. On the Licenses page, copy the new evaluation license key to your clipboard and paste it into the License Key field of the Setup Wizard.

Step 3 of 4: Administrator Account

After completing the second step, the third page of the wizard sets up an administrator account.

Once this initial administrator account is created, that administrator can then create other administrators.

Step 4 of 4: Email Notification

The last page of the Setup Wizard allows you to configure the outgoing emails from JIRA.

To enable or disable email notifications (you can always enable them later), select the respective Enable or Disable radio buttons.

If you enable email notifications, you will need to set up a connection to a mail server, as indicated in the following screenshot.

You're done!

Once you complete step 4, JIRA will be ready for use. The Welcome screen will lead you through creating a project for your new JIRA installation, or you can opt to set it up yourself.

For more information on getting started with JIRA, please refer to the following guides: