The description of the installation of JIRA uses Linux as example. Please see Installing JIRA on Windows for installation instructions concerning Windows systems and here for installation on Solaris.

1Java must be installed and the environment variable $JAVA_HOME must be set. Using the command ‚print_env‘, respectively ‘set‘ all environment variables for a user can be issued. Please use the following commands to define the environment variable $JAVA_HOME: find /usr/lib /usr/bin/ | grep -Ei “java” Please add the following lines in the file /etc/profile: export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/path-that-was-found-for-java export PATH=$JAVA_HOME/bin:$PATH Depending on the used shell the lines can also be entered into the user´s .bashrc under which JIRA is supposed to run later on.

2Unpacking of the archive: tar -xvzf atlassian-jira-6.4.4.tar.gz

3JIRA home must be defined. The JIRA instance must know in which directory it can be found so that JIRA can work properly. For this JIRA home is definite for each JIRA installation. In the file ‘jira-application.properties‘ the value ‚jira.home’ must be set. After unpacking the file can be found in the directory ‘./atlassian-jira/WEB-INF/classes/’ jira.home=/home/jira/ Please keep in mind that the value of the home directory must not be a parent directory of the servlet directory: Configured jira.home ‘…/jira’ must not be a parent directory of the webapp servlet path ‘…/jira/atlassian-jira‘ Besides, the environment variable $JIRA_HOME can also be defined for the separate users if plugins and add-ons are supposed to be developed later on using the JIRA installation.
export JIRA_HOME=/home/jira/

3.1For the unambiguousness of the JIRA home directory it is advisable to generate a user for each installation, e.g. the user „jira“

useradd jira
passwd jira

Under MacOSX:
dscl . -create /Users/jira UserShell /bin/bash
passwd jira

The home directory of the new user will be defined as JIRA home. Afterwards, please change to the user „jira“

sh-3.2# su – jira

Now JIRA has (as user „jira“) complete access rights for the directory JIRA home and (possibly) unlimited rights for the JIRA installation directory. The access rights are necessary so that JIRA can load all templates, plugins/modules, etc. See Troubleshooting.

jira:~ jira$ cat .bashrc
JAVA_HOME=/usr/bin/java
JIRA_HOME=/Users/jira
ATLAS_HOME=/usr/share/atlassian-plugin-sdk-5.0.13
export JAVA_HOME
export JIRA_HOME
export ATLAS_HOME

4After the installation of JIRA it can be started via the shell script ‘bin/start-jira.sh’ During this process JIRA will start all required components:

– Apache
– Apache Tomcat
– Apache Catalina (Servlet-Container by Tomcat)
– HSQLDB

For issue tracking you can find the log files, for example, in logs/catalina.out or for Apache Tomcat logs/catalina-YYYY-MM-DD.log, respectively for the web server under logs/access_log.YYYY-MM-DD

JIRA can also be started in the foreground instead of as demon. For this, JIRA is processed with the rights of the current user. The output is shown on the console and facilitates the troubleshooting. See [#troubleshooting]

./start-jira.sh -fg

Analogical to the start script a script is available for stopping JIRA, if it was not started in the foreground:

./stop-jira.sh

After the start the JIRA server runs on port 8080 (default setting), available in the browser under http://localhost:8080/

If port 8080 is already used by another application, e.g. a Node.js Webserver, settings for JIRA can be made in the file ‘conf/server.xml’ If JIRA starts without any error, JIRA can now be installed under http://localhost:8080/secure/SetupMode!default.jspa