Documentation for JIRA 4.0. Documentation for other versions of JIRA is available too.

The JIRA home directory contains key data that help define how JIRA works. You must have a JIRA home directory specified for your JIRA instance before you can start it. This document describes how to set up the JIRA home directory for your JIRA instance.

One JIRA home per JIRA instance

You can only have one JIRA home per JIRA instance. If you have multiple JIRA instances, you will need to set up a JIRA home for each instance. A lock is placed on the root level of a JIRA home when created, to ensure that it is only used by one JIRA instance. If you have accidentally locked your JIRA home directory, you can unlock it by following the instructions in this FAQ.

You only need to specify the location of the root directory for your JIRA home. The sub-directories will be created automatically when JIRA is started or when you use a function in JIRA that requires a particular sub-directory.

How do I set my JIRA home?

The recommended way to specify the location of your JIRA Home Directory is to:

  • Edit the jira-application.properties file (see the JIRA Installation Directory page to find where this file is located), add a 'jira.home' property and set it to your desired location for the JIRA home directory. Please use forward-slashes ("/"), not back-slashes ("\").

Note:

  • If you are using the Windows installer, you don't need to do this as you will be prompted to specify the location for your JIRA home during installation..
  • If you are using JIRA WAR-EAR, you need to set your JIRA home before you build JIRA.

Alternatively, you can specify the location of your JIRA Home Directory as follows:

  • Add a web context property called 'jira.home' — this property is set in different files depending on your application server. For example, for Tomcat (and therefore for JIRA Standalone), you will need to configure the server.xml file. For other application servers you may need to configure the web.xml file, or set 'Context parameter' options on the deployment UI of the application server, etc. Note that If you have specified a JIRA home in jira-application.properties (ie. the recommended method), it will override your web context property.

What location should I specify for my JIRA home?

You can specify any location on a disk for your JIRA home directory. Please be sure to specify an absolute path.

Please note that you cannot use the same JIRA home directory for multiple instances of JIRA. We recommend that you do not specify your JIRA home directory to be inside your installation directory, to prevent information from being accidentally lost during major operations (e.g. backing up and restoring instances).

How do I change my JIRA home?

To change the location of your JIRA home directory,

  1. Set your JIRA home to the new location, using your preferred method as described in "How do I set my JIRA home?" (above).
  2. Restart JIRA.
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