Documentation for JIRA 4.3. Documentation for other versions of JIRA is available too.

The 'JIRA installation directory' is the directory into which the JIRA application files and libraries have been unpacked (unzipped) when JIRA was installed. JIRA does not modify or store any data in this directory.

Important Files and Directories

The directories/files described below are found under the different sub-directories of the JIRA Installation directory, depending on whether you have installed JIRA Standalone or JIRA EAR/WAR. Please substitute the following directories for the <install-dir> placeholder below, as follows:

  • JIRA Standaloneatlassian-jira subdirectory
  • JIRA EAR/WARwebapp subdirectory (please note, if you want to edit any files in the webapp directory you will need to copy them to the edit-webapp subdirectory and edit the copies as described in JIRA WAR-EAR Configuration Overview. Copies of the jira-application.properties and entityengine.xml file are already available in the edit-webapp sub-directory).

<install-dir>/WEB-INF/classes/jira-application.properties

This file tells JIRA where to find the JIRA Home Directory, as well as storing many other configuration settings . This file is modified by the administrator when installing JIRA Standalone (not using Windows installer) or Installing JIRA WAR-EAR.

<install-dir>/WEB-INF/classes/osuser.xml

This file is modified when connecting JIRA to an external user management system such as an LDAP server or Atlassian's Crowd. For more information, refer to User and Group Management.

<install-dir>/WEB-INF/lib/

This is the directory where plugins built on Atlassian's Plugin Framework 1 (i.e. 'Plugins 1' plugins) are stored. If you are installing a new 'Plugins 1' plugin, you will need to deploy it into this directory.
'Plugins 2' plugins should be stored in the JIRA Home directory.

<install-dir>/WEB-INF/classes/log4j.properties

JIRA's logging configuration file. See Logging and Profiling.

The actual log files generated by JIRA can be found in the following locations:

  • JIRA application logbin/atlassian-jira.log
  • Application server log — generally the application server log file can be found under the logs directory. However, this can vary depending on the application server you are running. Please see Where are the application server logs? for further details.

<install-dir>/WEB-INF/classes/entityengine.xml

This file configures the OFBiz Entity Engine which JIRA uses to store persist data in a datasource. See Configuring the Entity Engine for JIRA.

The sub-directories/files described below are found under the root of the JIRA Installation directory.

conf/server.xml

This file is used for JIRA SSL configuration. See Running JIRA over SSL or HTTPS.

Memory Settings

The file used to edit JAVA_OPTS memory settings will depend on the method used to install JIRA, as well as the operating system used for your installation.

For example, if you are running JIRA on Tomcat in Windows (manual startup), you would update the following file:
bin\setenv.bat
whereas for JIRA on Tomcat in Unix, you would update this file:
bin/setenv.sh

See Increasing JIRA Memory for further details.