Installing Jira on AWS

Jira is a widely used issue tracker, among other things. Below is a set of steps to get it up and running on an AWS server (Amazon’s Web Services).

NB: Do not try to install Jira on the free tier AWS servers, they are simply not powerful enough and run out of memory during installation. I found out the slow and tedious way!

First make sure everything is up-to-date

sudo yum update

Install the webserver that will host Jira

sudo yum groupinstall 'Web Server'

Install the SQL database that Jira will use to store all of our issues etc. (You can use the file based default database but it is not recommend for anything other than a trial)

sudo yum groupinstall 'MySQL Database'

Install PHP

sudo yum groupinstall 'PHP Support'

sudo yum install php-mysql

Start the webserver

sudo service httpd start

Ensure the webserver starts on boot

sudo chkconfig httpd on

Start the SQL server

sudo service mysqld start

Now that the SQL server service is running we want to make sure it is installed securely so run the secure installation command.

sudo mysql_secure_installation

Login to mysql and execute the following commands to setup our Jira database

mysql -u root -p

CREATE DATABASE jiradb CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_bin;

GRANT SELECT,INSERT,UPDATE,DELETE,CREATE,DROP,ALTER,INDEX on jiradb.* TO 'jirauser'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'jirapassword';

FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

exit;

Validate that the database was setup correctly by logging back in with the new user:

mysql \--user=jirauser \--password=jirapassword \--database=jiradb

exit;

Now we have to download the jira files

wget http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/downloads/binary/atlassian-jira-6.4.9-x64.bin

Move, extract and correct permissions for the files

mkdir jira

mv ./atlassian-jira-6.4.9-x64.bin ./jira/

cd jira/atlassian-jira-6.4.9-x64.bin

cd jira/

chmod +x atlassian-jira-6.4.9-x64.bin

sudo ./atlassian-jira-6.4.9-x64.bin

We need the Java connector for Jira to communicate to the SQL database, download it and move it to the correct place.

 wget http://dev.mysql.com/get/Downloads/Connector-J/mysql-connector-java-5.1.36.tar.gz

 tar -zxvf mysql-connector-java-5.1.36.tar.gz

 cd /opt/atlassian/jira/

cp ~/jira/mysql-connector-java-5.1.36/mysql-connector-java-5.1.36-bin.jar ./lib

sudo cp ~/jira/mysql-connector-java-5.1.36/mysql-connector-java-5.1.36-bin.jar ./lib

cd bin/

Stop and start Jira

sudo ./stop-jira.sh

sudo ./start-jira.sh

 

You should now be able to access jira on the address below:

<ip>:8080

or

localhost:8080