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- Herausgeber: Packt Publishing
- Kategorie: Fachliteratur
- Sprache: Englisch
Atlassian JIRA is an enterprise-issue tracker system. One of its key strengths is its ability to adapt to the needs of the organization, ranging from building Atlassian application interfaces to providing a platform for add-ons to extend JIRA's capabilities.
JIRA 7 Essentials, now in its fourth edition, provides a comprehensive explanation covering all major components of JIRA 7, which includes JIRA Software, JIRA Core, and JIRA Service Works.
The book starts by explaining how to plan and set up a new JIRA 7 instance from scratch for production use before moving on to the more key features such as e-mails, workflows, business processes, and so on. Then you will understand JIRA's data hierarchy and how to design and work with projects in JIRA.
Issues being the corner stone of using JIRA, you will gain a deep understanding of issues and their purpose. Then you will be introduced to fields and how to use custom fields for more effective data collections. You will then learn to create new screens from scratch and customize it to suit your needs. The book then covers workflows and business processes, and you will also be able to set up both incoming and outgoing mail servers to work with e-mails. Towards the end, we explain JIRA's security model and introduce you to one of JIRA’s new add-ons: JIRA Service Desk, which allows you to run JIRA as a computer support portal.
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JIRA 7 Essentials - Fourth Edition
JIRA 7 Essentials - Fourth Edition
Copyright © 2016 Packt Publishing
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.
Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the author, nor Packt Publishing, and its dealers and distributors will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by this book.
Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all of the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.
First published: May 2011
Second edition: April 2013
Third edition: April 2015
Fourth edition: November 2016
Production reference: 1181116
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Credits
Author
Patrick Li
Copy Editor
Pranjali Chury
Reviewer
Miroslav Kralik
Project Coordinator
Izzat Contractor
Commissioning Editor
Kunal Parikh
Proofreader
Safis Editing
Acquisition Editor
Chaitanya Nair
Indexer
Rekha Nair
Content Development Editor
Rohit Kumar Singh
Graphics
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Technical Editor
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Production Coordinator
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About the Author
Patrick Li is the cofounder of AppFusions and now works as a senior engineer there. AppFusions is one of the leading Atlassian experts, specializing in integration solutions with many enterprise applications and platforms, including IBM Connections, Jive, Google Apps, Box, SugarCRM, and more. He has worked in the Atlassian ecosystem for over 9 years, developing products and solutions for the Atlassian platform and providing expert consulting services.
He has authored numerous books and video courses covering JIRA 4 to 7, including JIRA Agile and JIRA Service Desk. He has extensive experience in designing and deploying Atlassian solutions from the ground up and customizing existing deployments for clients across verticals such as healthcare, software engineering, financial services, and government agencies.
You can check out his LinkedIn profile at https://www.linkedin.com/in/patrickliangli or visit his company website at https://www.appfusions.com/display/Dashboard/Bringing+it+together%2C+NOW.
About the Reviewer
Miroslav Kralik is a product owner and Atlassian Tools Evangelist at MSD IT Global Innovation Center, and he cofounded Podporuj.cz.
His passion is to help customers succeed and make products, services, and processes better and innovative. His focus is now on DevOps and the integration of different tools in the whole development chain, where JIRA as an issue-and bug-tracking system belongs.
Besides this, Miroslav has dedicated his time to the Podporuj.cz project, which was created to support non-profit organizations in the Czech Republic and people with irreversible physical disabilities who depend on others to take care of their basic needs. Thanks to this project, it is now possible for people around the world to freely contribute with their daily activities—shopping--to the campaigns and running of NGOs.
Miroslav can be found on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikralik.
With this opportunity, I would like to thank all the DevOps Stack team members for their time, effort, and passion, and for the opportunity of being part of such a great team, to whom this book is also dedicated.
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Preface
Over the years, JIRA has grown from a simple bug-tracking system designed for engineers to manage their projects to an all-purpose issue-tracking solution. As it has matured over time, JIRA has become more than an application—it has transformed into a platform with a suite of other products that are built on it, enabling it to adapt and deliver value to a wide variety of use cases.
Starting with JIRA 7, the term JIRA now refers to a family of products suite, including JIRA Software, JIRA Service Desk, and JIRA Core. With this change, each product is more focused on what they do and the value they bring. It is now easier than ever for customers to choose the product best suited to their needs, whether they are running an Agile software development project, a customer support portal, or simply a generic task management system.
In this book, we will cover all the basics of JIRA and the core capabilities of each product in the family along with the add-ons that add additional features to the JIRA platform.
Packed with real-life examples and step-by-step instructions, this book will help you become a JIRA expert.
What this book covers
This book is organized into eleven chapters. The first chapter starts with setting up your own JIRA, and the subsequent chapters will introduce key features and concepts. With each chapter, you will learn about important concepts such as business processes, workflows, e-mails, and notifications. You will also have the opportunity to put your newly acquired knowledge into practice by following a live JIRA sample implementation.
Chapter 1, Getting Started with JIRA, serves as the starting point of the book and aims to guide you to set up a local copy of a JIRA Software application that will be used throughout the book. For seasoned JIRA experts, this will both refresh your knowledge and also introduce you to the changes in JIRA 7. By the end of this chapter, you should have a running JIRA application.
Chapter 2, Using JIRA for Business Projects, covers using JIRA for projects that are not based on software development, for example, a generic task management solution. This chapter focuses on use the basic features of JIRA, which are offered through the JIRA Core product, which is bundled with JIRA Software.
Chapter 3, Using JIRA for Agile Projects, covers features specific to JIRA Software. This chapter focuses on using JIRA for software development projects, especially using Agile methodologies such as Scrum and Kanban.
Chapter 4, Issue Management, covers everything related to issue creation and the operations that can be performed on an issue (excluding workflow transitions). Furthermore, this chapter touches on the various aspects of issues, as they are the focal point of JIRA. This chapter also serves as an opportunity to show and allow you to set up dummy data that will be used by the sample project.
Chapter 5, Field Management, covers how JIRA collects data through the use of fields and how to expand on this ability through the use of custom fields. This chapter then continues with the various behaviors that can be configured for fields.
Chapter 6, Screen Management, builds on the preceding chapter and explores the concept of screens and how users can create and manage their own screens. This chapter ties in all the previous chapters to show the power behind JIRA's screen design capabilities.
Chapter 7, Workflow and Business Process, explores the most powerful feature offered by JIRA, workflows. The concept of issue life cycles is introduced, and various aspects of workflows explained. This chapter also explores the relationship between workflows and other various JIRA aspects that have been previously covered, such as screens. The concept of JIRA add-ons is also briefly touched upon in the sample project, using some popular add-ons.
Chapter 8, E-mails and Notifications, focuses on how to get automatic e-mail notifications from JIRA and explores the different settings that can be applied. This is a very important and powerful feature of JIRA and also a critical part of the example project featured in this book. This chapter also ties in the workflow chapter and explains in detail how JIRA manages its notification mechanism.
Chapter 9, Securing JIRA, focuses on the different security control features offered by JIRA. As this topic affects all aspects of JIRA, all previous topics are touched on, explaining how security can be applied to each. It also covers LDAP integration, where you can hook up your JIRA with an existing LDAP system for user management.
Chapter 10, Searching, Reporting, and Analysis, focuses on how data captured in JIRA can be retrieved to provide various types of reporting features. It also covers the changes introduced in JIRA 7.
Chapter 11, JIRA Service Desk, covers the new JIRA Service Desk product from the JIRA 7 product family. It transforms JIRA into a fully fledged service desk solution. This chapter looks at setting up and customizing service desks, integrating with Atlassian Confluence to set up a knowledge base, and defining custom SLA metrics.
What you need for this book
The installation package used in this book will be the Windows Installer standalone distribution, which you can get directly from Atlassian at https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/download for JIRA Software and https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/service-desk/download for JIRA Service Desk.
You will also need additional software, including Java SDK, which you can get from http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/index.html and MySQL, which you can get from http://dev.mysql.com/downloads.
Who this book is for
This book will be especially useful for project managers, but it's also intended for other JIRA users, including developers, and any other industry besides software development who would like to leverage JIRA’s powerful task management and workflow features to better manage their business processes.
Conventions
In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "Find and open the web.xml file in the JIRA_INSTALL/atlassian-jira/WEB-INF directory."
A block of code is set as follows:
<Connector port="8443" maxHttpHeaderSize="8192" SSLEnabled="true" maxThreads="150" minSpareThreads="25" maxSpareThreads="75" enableLookups="false" disableUploadTimeout="true" acceptCount="100" scheme="https" secure="true" clientAuth="false" sslProtocol="TLS" useBodyEncodingForURI="true"/>Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
keytool –genkey –alias tomcat –keyalg RSANew terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "If you do not have your e-mail server information handy, you can skip this step now by selecting the Later option and clicking on Finish."
Note
Warnings or important notes appear in a box like this.
Tip
Tips and tricks appear like this.
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Chapter 1. Getting Started with JIRA
In this chapter, we will start with a high-level view of JIRA, going through each of the components that make up the overall application. We will then examine the various deployment options, system requirements for JIRA 7, and platforms/software that are supported. Finally, we will get our hands dirty by installing our very own JIRA 7 from scratch with the newly improved installation wizard. In the end, we will also cover some post-installation steps, such as setting up SSL to secure our new instance.
By the end of this chapter, you will have learned about the following:
JIRA Core, JIRA Software, and JIRA Service Desk
Starting with JIRA 7, JIRA is split into three different products, and the term JIRA now refers to the common platform that all these products are built on. The three products that make up the new JIRA family are the following:
As you can see, JIRA Core is at the center, providing all the base functionalities such as user interface customization, workflows, and e-mail notifications, while JIRA Software and JIRA Service Desk add specialized features on top of it.
In this book, we will mostly focus on JIRA Software. However, since JIRA Core provides many of the common features, most of the knowledge is also applicable to JIRA Core, and features that are only available to JIRA Software will be highlighted. For this reason, the term JIRA will be used to cover both JIRA Core and JIRA Software, unless a distinction is required. We will also cover JIRA Service Desk in Chapter 11, JIRA Service Desk.
The JIRA architecture
Installing JIRA is simple and straightforward. However, it is important for you to understand the components that make up the overall architecture of JIRA and the installation options available. This will help you make an informed decision and be better prepared for future maintenance and troubleshooting.
High-level architecture
Atlassian provides a comprehensive overview of the JIRA architecture at https://developer.atlassian.com/jiradev/jira-platform/jira-architecture/jira-technical-overview. However, for the day-to-day administration and usage of JIRA, we do not need to get into details; the information provided can be overwhelming at first glance. For this reason, we have summarized a high-level overview, which highlights the most important components in the architecture, as shown in the following figure:
Web browsers
JIRA is a web application, so there is no need for users to install anything on their machines. All they need is a web browser that is compatible with JIRA. The following table summarizes the browser requirements for JIRA:
Browsers
Compatibility
Internet Explorer
10.0, 11.0
Mozilla Firefox
Latest stable versions
Safari
Latest stable versions on Mac OSX
Google Chrome
Latest stable versions
Mobile
Mobile Safari
Mobile Chrome
Application services
The application services layer contains all the functions and services provided by JIRA. These services include various business functions, such as workflow and notification, which will be discussed in depth in Chapter 6, Workflows and Business Processes and Chapter 7, E-mails and Notifications, respectively. Other services such as REST/Web Service provide integration points to other applications The OSGi service provides the base add-on framework to extend JIRA's functionalities.
Data storage
The data storage layer stores persistent data in several places within JIRA. Most business data, such as projects and issues, are stored in a relational database. Content such as uploaded attachments and search indexes are stored in the file system in the JIRA_HOME directory, which we will talk about in the next section. The underlying relational database used is transparent to users, and you can migrate from one database to another with ease, as referenced at https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRA/Switching+Databases.
The JIRA installation directory
The JIRA installation directory is where you install JIRA. It contains all the executable and configuration files of the application. JIRA neither modifies the contents of the files in this directory during runtime, nor does it store any data files inside the directory. The directory is used primarily for execution. For the remainder of the book, we will refer to this directory as JIRA_INSTALL.
The JIRA home directory
The JIRA home directory contains key data and configuration files specific to each JIRA instance, such as JIRA's database connectivity details. As we will see later in this chapter, setting the path to this directory is part of the installation process.
There is a one-to-one relationship between JIRA and this directory. This means each JIRA instance must (and can) have only one home directory, and each directory can serve only one JIRA instance. In the old days, this directory was sometimes called the data directory. It has now been standardized as the JIRA Home. It is for this reason that, for the rest of the book, we will refer to this directory as JIRA_HOME.
The JIRA_HOME directory can be created anywhere on your system or even on a shared drive. It is recommended to use a fast disk drive with low network latency to get the best performance from JIRA.
This separation of data and application makes tasks such as maintenance and future upgrades an easier process. Within JIRA_HOME, there are several subdirectories that contain vital data, as shown in the following table:
Directory
Description
data
This directory contains data that is not stored in the database, for example, uploaded attachment files.
export
This directory contains the automated backup archives created by JIRA. This is different from a manual export executed by a user; manual exports require the user to specify where to store the archive.
import
This directory contains the backups that can be imported. JIRA will only load backup files from this directory.
log
This directory contains JIRA log files, useful to track down errors. Some of the key log files include:
plugins
This directory is where installed add-ons are stored. In the previous versions of JIRA, add-ons were installed by copying add-on files to this directory manually; however, in JIRA 7, you will no longer need to do this, unless specifically instructed to do so. Add-ons will be discussed further in later chapters.
caches
This directory contains cache data that JIRA uses to improve its performance at runtime. For example, search indexes are stored in this directory.
tmp
This directory contains temporary files created at runtime, such as file uploads.
When JIRA is running, the JIRA_HOME directory is locked. When JIRA shuts down, it is unlocked. This locking mechanism prevents multiple JIRA instances from reading/writing to the same JIRA_HOME directory and causing data corruption.
JIRA locks the JIRA_HOME directory by writing a temporary file called jira-home.lock into the root of the directory. During the shutdown, this file will be removed. However, sometimes JIRA may fail to remove this file, such as during an ungraceful shutdown. In this case, you can manually remove this locked file to unlock the directory so that you can start up JIRA again.
Tip
You can manually remove the locked file to unlock the JIRA_HOME directory if JIRA fails to clean it up during the shutdown.
System requirements
Just like any other software application, a set of base requirements needs to be met before you can install and run JIRA. Therefore, it is important for you to be familiar with these requirements so that you can plan out your deployment successfully. Note that these requirements are for a behind-the-firewall deployment, also known as the JIRA Server. Atlassian also offers a Cloud-based alternative called JIRA Cloud, available at https://www.atlassian.com/software#cloud-products.
The cloud version of JIRA is similar to the behind-the-firewall JIRA deployment in most areas, and it is perfect for organizations that do not want to have the overhead of the initial setup and just want to get up-and-running quickly. One major limitation of JIRA Cloud is that you cannot use many of the third-party add-ons available. If you want to have all the power and flexibility of the JIRA Server and worry-free server management, you may consider managed hosting for JIRA offered by third-party vendors.
Hardware requirements
For evaluation purposes, where there will only be a small number of users, JIRA will run happily on any server that has a 1.5 GHz processor and 1 GB to 2 GB of RAM. As your JIRA usage grows, a typical server will have a quad core 2 GHz CPU and 4 GB of RAM dedicated to the JIRA application.
For production deployment, as in most applications, it is recommended that you run JIRA on its own dedicated server. There are many factors that you should consider when deciding the extent of the resources to allocate to JIRA; keep in mind how JIRA will scale and grow. When deciding on your hardware needs, you should consider the following:
It can be difficult at times to estimate these figures. As a reference, a server running with over 2.0 GHz of dual/quad CPU and 2 GB of RAM will be sufficient for most instances with around 200 active users. If you start to get into thousands of active users, you will need to have at least 8 GB of RAM allocated to JIRA (JVM).
Officially, JIRA only supports x86 hardware and 64-bit derivatives of it. When running JIRA on a 64-bit system, you will be able to allocate more than 4 GB of memory to JIRA, the limit if you are using a 32-bit system. If you are planning to deploy a large instance, it is recommended that you use a 64-bit system.
Software requirements
JIRA has four requirements when it comes to software. It needs a supported operating system and a Java environment. It also needs an application server to host and serve its contents and a database to store all of its data. In the following sections, we will discuss each of these requirements and the options that you have to install and run JIRA. You can find the latest information online at https://confluence.atlassian.com/adminjiraserver071/supported-platforms-802592168.html.
Operating systems
JIRA supports most of the major operating systems, so the choice of which operating system to run JIRA on becomes a matter of expertise, comfort, and in most cases the existing organization's IT infrastructure and requirements.
The operating systems supported by Atlassian are Windows and Linux. There is a JIRA distribution for Mac OSX, but it is not officially supported. With both Windows and Linux, Atlassian provides an executable installer wizard package, which bundles all the necessary components to simplify the installation process (only available for standalone distribution).
There are minimal differences when it comes to installing, configuring, and maintaining JIRA on different operating systems. If you do not have any preferences and would like to keep the initial cost down, Linux is a good choice.
Java platforms
JIRA is a Java-based web application, so it needs to have a Java environment installed. This can be a Java Development Kit (JDK) or a Java Runtime Environment (JRE). The executable installer that comes with Windows or Linux contains the necessary files and will install and configure the JRE for you. However, if you want to use archive distributions, you will need to make sure that you have the required Java environment installed and configured.
JIRA 7 requires Java 8. If you run JIRA on an unsupported Java version, including its patch version, you may run into unexpected errors. The following table shows the supported Java versions for JIRA:
Java platforms
Support status
Oracle JDK/JRE
Java 8 (1.8)
Databases
JIRA stores all its data in a relational database. While you can run JIRA with HyperSQL Database (HSQLDB), the in-memory database that comes bundled with JIRA, it is prone to data corruption. You should only use this to set up a new instance quickly for evaluation purposes, where no important data will be stored. For this reason, it is important that you use a proper database such as MySQL for production systems.
Most relational databases available on the market today are supported by JIRA, and there are no differences when you install and configure JIRA. Just like operating systems, your choice of database will come down to your IT staff's expertise, experience, and established corporate standards. If you run Windows as your operating system, then you might probably want to go with the Microsoft SQL Server. On the other hand, if you run Linux, then you should consider Oracle (if you already have a license), MySQL, or PostgreSQL.
The following table summarizes the databases that are currently supported by JIRA. It is worth mentioning that both MySQL and PostgreSQL are open source products, so they are excellent options if you are looking to minimize your initial investments.
Database
Support status
MySQL
MySQL 5.1 and newer
This requires the latest JDBC driver
PostgreSQL
PostgreSQL 9.0 and newer
This requires the latest PostgreSQL driver
Microsoft SQL Server
SQL Server 2008 and newer
This requires latest JTDS driver
Oracle
Oracle 12C
This requires the latest Oracle driver
HSQLDB
This is bundled with the standalone distribution, for evaluation only
Take a special note of the driver requirement on each database, as some drivers that come bundled with the database vendor (for example, the SQL Server) are not supported.
Application servers
JIRA 7 officially only supports Apache Tomcat as the application server. While it is possible to deploy JIRA into other application servers, you will be doing this at your own risk, and it is not recommended.
The following table shows the versions of Tomcat supported by JIRA 7:
Application server
Support status
Apache Tomcat
Tomcat 8.0.17 and newer
By default, JIRA 7 ships with 8.0.17, so it is recommended that you use that version or newer.
Installation options
JIRA comes in two flavors: an executable installer and a ZIP archive. The executable installer provides a wizard-driven interface that will walk you through the entire installation process. It even comes with a Java installer to save you some time. The ZIP archive flavor contains everything except for a Java installer, which means you will have to install Java yourself. You will also need to perform some post-installation steps manually, such as installing JIRA as a service. However, you do get the advantage of learning what really goes on under the hood.
Installing and configuring JIRA
Now that you have a good understanding of the overall architecture of JIRA, the basic system requirements, and the various installation options, we are ready to deploy our own JIRA instances.
In the following exercise, we will be installing and configuring a fresh JIRA instance for a small production team. We will perform our installation on a Windows platform with a MySQL database server. If you are planning to use a different platform or database, refer to the vendor documentation on installing the required software for your platform.
In this exercise, you will do the following:
We will continue to use this JIRA instance in our subsequent chapters and exercises as we build our help desk implementation.
For our deployment, we will use the following:
Installing Java
Since we will be using the installer package with Java bundled, you can skip this section. However, if you are using the ZIP archive or WAR distribution, you need to make sure that you have Java installed on your system.
JIRA 7 requires JRE version 8 (1.8) or a newer run. You can verify the version of Java you have by running the following command in a Command Prompt:
java -versionThe preceding command tells us which version of Java is running on your system, as shown in the following screenshot:
If you do not see a similar output, then chances are you do not have Java installed. You will need to perform the following steps to set up your Java environment. We will start by installing JDK on your system:
Note
At the time of writing this, the latest version of Java 8 is JDK 8 Update 91.
This will display the version of Java installed, if everything is done correctly. In Windows, you have to start a new Command Prompt after you have added the environment variable to see the change.
Installing MySQL
The next step is to prepare an enterprise database for your JIRA installation. JIRA requires a fresh database. If, during the installation process, JIRA detects that the target database already contains any data, it will not proceed. If you already have a database system installed, then you may skip this section.
To install MySQL, simply perform the following steps:
Note
At the time of writing, the latest version of MySQL is 5.7.13.
Preparing MySQL for JIRA
Now that you have MySQL installed, you need to first create a user for JIRA to connect MySQL with, and then create a fresh database for JIRA to store all its data:
We are doing several things here. First, we create a user called jirauser and assign the password jirauserpassword to him. You should change the username and password to something else.
We have also granted all the privileges to the user for the jiradb database that we just created so that the user can perform database operations, such as create/drop tables and insert/delete data. If you have named your database something other than jiradb, then make sure that you change the command so that it uses the name of your database.
This allows you to control the fact that only authorized users (specified in the preceding command) are able to access the JIRA database to ensure data security and integrity.
To verify your setup, exit the current interactive session by issuing the following command:quit;Start a new interactive session with your newly created user:mysql -u jirauser -pYou will be prompted for a password, which you have set up in the preceding command as jirauser.Use the following command:show databases;This will list all the databases that are currently accessible by the logged-in user. You should see jiradb among the list of databases.
Examine the jiradb database by issuing the following commands:use jiradb;show tables;The first command connects you to the jiradb database, so all of your subsequent commands will be executed against the correct database.
The second command lists all the tables that exist in the jiradb database. Right now, the list should be empty, since no tables have been created for JIRA; but don't worry, as soon as we connect to JIRA, all the tables will automatically be created.
Installing JIRA
With the Java environment and database prepared, you can now move on to install JIRA. Normally, there are only two steps:
Obtaining and installing JIRA
The first step is to download the latest stable release of JIRA. You can download Atlassian JIRA from http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/download.
The Atlassian website will detect the operating system you are using and automatically suggest an installation package for you to download. If you intend to install JIRA on a different operating system from the one you are currently on, make sure that you select the correct operating system package.
As mentioned earlier, with Windows there is a Windows installer package and a self-extracting ZIP package. For the purpose of this exercise, we will use the installer package (Windows 64-bit Installer):
Note
Since we need to install the MySQL database driver for JIRA, we are launching JIRA in the browser now to verify that the installation was successful.
Installing MySQL driver
JIRA does not come bundled with the MySQL database driver, so we have to install it manually. You can download the required driver from http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/connector/j/. Once downloaded, you can install the driver by copying the driver JAR file into the JIRA_INSTALL/lib directory. After that, you need to restart JIRA. If you have installed JIRA as a Windows service in step 9, refer to the Starting and stopping JIRA section.
Note
Make sure that you select the Platform Independent option and download the JAR or TAR archive.
The JIRA setup wizard
JIRA comes with an easy-to-use setup wizard that will walk you through the installation and configuration process in six simple steps. You will be able to configure the database connections, default language, and much more. You can access the wizard by opening http://localhost:<port number> in your browser, where the <port number> is the number you have assigned to JIRA in step 6 of the installation.
In the first step of the wizard, we need to select how we want JIRA to be set up. Since we are installing JIRA for production use, we will select the I'll set it up myself option.
For the second step, we will need to select the database we want to use. This is where we configure JIRA to use the MySQL database we have created earlier in this chapter. If you select the Built In option, JIRA will use its bundled in-memory database, which is good for evaluation purposes. If you want to use a proper database, such as in our case, you should select the My Own Database option.
Note
The Built In option is great to get JIRA up and running quickly for evaluation purposes.
After you have selected the My Own Database option, the wizard will expand for you to provide the database connection details. If you do not have the necessary database driver installed, JIRA will prompt you for it, as shown in the preceding screenshot.
Once you have filled in the details for your database, it is a good idea to first click on the Test Connection button to verify that JIRA is able to connect to the database. If everything is set up correctly, JIRA will report a success message. You should be able to move onto the next step by clicking on the Next button. This may take a few minutes, as JIRA will now create all the necessary database objects. Once this is done, you will be taken to step 3 of the wizard.
In the third step, you will need to provide some basic details about this JIRA instance. Once you have filled in the required fields, click on Next to move on to step 4 of the wizard.
In the fourth step, we need to provide a license key for JIRA. If you have already obtained a license from Atlassian, you can paste it into the Your License Key text box. If you do not have a license, you can generate an evaluation license by clicking on the generate a JIRA trial license link. The evaluation license will grant you access to JIRA's full set of features for one month. After the evaluation period ends, you will lose the ability to create new issues, but you can still access your data.
