The plain simple guide to installing Atlassian JIRA on CentOS 8

I recently installed Atlassian JIRA on a CentOS 8 minimal install and ran into an issue with running the installation as a service. The issue was reproducible on another CentOS 8 machine.

I found it a good idea to post my workaround because I could not find any other solution. Here is what I did.

Download the version to be installed from the Atlassian download repository.

wget https://product-downloads.atlassian.com/software/jira/downloads/atlassian-jira-software-8.8.1-x64.bin -O atlassian-jira-software.bin

Change permissions and run the installer

chmod +x atlassian-jira-software.bin
./atlassian-jira-software.bin

Accept the default values. I only changed the Http port, because the JIRA default port is already in use by another program.

Do NOT install Jira as service. If you choose YES, all configuration will be in place, but JIRA will not start automatically.

Configure your local firewall accordingly

firewall-cmd --permanent --add-port=8085/tcp
firewall-cmd --reload

JIRA software requires a database for its installation, therefore the first step will be to create a database in the (here goes your) database engine. I use PostgreSQL. The user postgres already exists because I use the same machine for Atlassian BitBucket.

su - postgres
psql
postgres=# CREATE USER jiradbuser PASSWORD 'jiradbpassword';
postgres=# CREATE DATABASE jiradb WITH ENCODING 'UNICODE' LC_COLLATE 'C' LC_CTYPE 'C' TEMPLATE template0;
postgres=# GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON DATABASE jiradb to jiradbuser

Now for the workaround. As user root create a new file using your preferred text editor.

nano /etc/systemd/system/jira.service

Copy and paste the following lines into jira.service. If you have changed the default installation path, make sure to modify the path accordingly.

[Unit]
Description=Jira Issue & Project Tracking Software
[Service]
Type=forking
User=jira
PIDFile=/opt/atlassian/jira/work/catalina.pid
ExecStart=/opt/atlassian/jira/bin/start-jira.sh
ExecStop=/opt/atlassian/jira/bin/stop-jira.sh
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Save the file and reload the systemctl daemon. Then enable the new service and start JIRA.

systemctl daemon-reload
systemctl enable jira
systemctl start jira

Now you can open the JIRA web site in your browser and setup and configure your JIRA instance.