Documentation for JIRA 4.1. Documentation for other versions of JIRA is available too.

Customisations to Velocity templates or other JIRA files are not included in the scope of Atlassian Support.

Deploying Velocity Templates without a Restart

In a development instance, you can play with picking up velocity file changes without a restart.
From <jira-install>/atlassian-jira/WEB-INF/classes/velocity.properties:

  1. Change class.resource.loader.cache from true to false
  2. Uncomment (remove the # sign) from #velocimacro.library.autoreload=true

Keep in mind that the next time you upgrade JIRA – or need a new installation for any reason – you will have to manually copy any changes you have made to the JSPs or tempates into the new installation of JIRA. If the JSPs or templates have changed in the newer version, you will have to port your customization into them.

JIRA generates emails in reaction to events using a templating engine. The templating engine is Apache Jakarta's Velocity. This is a relatively easy to use templating language that can pull apart java objects in useful ways. The mails are generated inside JIRA by invoking Velocity with a set of objects of relevance to the event.

To customise email content, please follow this procedure.

  1. Open up your JIRA distribution, and navigate to the following paths:
    • Standalone: atlassian-jira\WEB-INF\classes\templates\email
    • Source: jira\src\etc\java\templates\email
    • WAR: webapp\WEB-INF\classes\templates\email
  2. Under this directory there are three directories: html, text and subject. The html subdirectory contains the templates used to create emails in html, while the text directory the plain text mail outs. The subject directory contains the templates used to generate the subject of the emails. The templates are named after the event that will trigger the email.
  3. Bring the template up in your favourite text editor. Referring to the JIRA template documentation (particularly Velocity Context for Email Templates) and Velocity Users Guide, make the customisations you want.
  4. Restart JIRA.

See also Adding Custom Fields to Email.



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