Book Image

JIRA 7 Essentials - Fourth Edition

By : Patrick Li
Book Image

JIRA 7 Essentials - Fourth Edition

By: Patrick Li

Overview of this book

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.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
JIRA 7 Essentials - Fourth Edition
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

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:

  • The number of active users in the system

  • The number of issues and projects in the system

  • The number of configuration items such as custom fields and workflows

  • The number of concurrent users, especially during peak hours

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.