Documentation for JIRA 5.1.x. 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 specify the location of the JIRA home directory for your JIRA instance.
One JIRA home per JIRA instance
You can only have one JIRA Home Directory per JIRA installation. If you have multiple JIRA installations, you will need to set up a JIRA Home Directory for each installation. A lock is placed at the root level of a JIRA Home Directory when it is created to ensure that it can only used by one JIRA installation.
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.
There are a few methods available for specifying the location of your JIRA Home Directory in JIRA. However, please be aware of the notes below before your specify this location.
The recommended methods for specifying the location of your JIRA Home Directory in JIRA are to:
jira-application.properties
file and set the value of the 'jira.home
' property to the desired location for your JIRA Home Directory. If you are specifying this location's path on Windows, use double back-slashes ("\") between subdirectories. For example, X:\\path\\to\\JIRA\\Home
JIRA_HOME
in your operating system whose value is the location of your JIRA Home Directory. To do this:set JIRA_HOME=X:\path\to\JIRA\Home
JIRA_HOME
environment variable value using this format, where:X
is the drive letter where your JIRA Home Directory is located and=
')export JIRA_HOME=/path/to/jira/home
Please Note: If you have specified different values for a 'jira.home
' property in the jira-application.properties
file and a JIRA_HOME
environment variable, the value of the JIRA_HOME
environment variable takes precedence.
Alternatively, you can specify the location of your JIRA Home Directory as property within your application server:
Configure a new web context property called 'jira.home
' for your application server. To do this, you need to define this web context property inside a <parameter/>
element (as a child of the <context/>
element) in your server.xml
file (or jira.xml
file for JIRA WAR).
The server.xml
file is located within the conf
subdirectory of your JIRA Installation Directory and for JIRA WAR, the jira.xml
file is typically located within the conf/Catalina/localhost
subdirectory of the Apache Tomcat installation running JIRA:
<Context ...> ... <Parameter name="jira.home" value="c:/jira/home"/> ... </Context>
Please Note: A 'jira.home
' web context property defined in your application server overrides the value of the 'jira.home
' property defined in your jira-application.properties
file. However, a JIRA_HOME
environment variable defining your JIRA Home Directory will override either of these 'jira.home
' values.
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 locating your JIRA Home Directory completely independently of the JIRA Installation Directory (i.e. not nesting one within the other) as this will minimise information being lost during major operations (e.g. backing up and restoring instances).
To change the location of your JIRA home directory,