Welcome back to our blog! If you’re a developer or a project manager who regularly utilizes Jira, a popular issue and project tracking tool from Atlassian, you may be interested in setting up a local instance. This can be beneficial for testing, development, or simply familiarizing yourself with Jira’s features without impacting your live environment. In this post, we’ll walk you through the steps to get your local Jira instance up and running.
Step 1: Download Jira Software
The first step is to download the Jira Software Server from the official Atlassian website. Choose the version that works best for your operating system. Remember, for running Jira locally, you must download the Server version, not the Cloud version.
Step 2: Extract the File
Once the download is complete, you’ll need to extract the downloaded file to your preferred location. This can be accomplished using any standard extraction tool. The extracted folder will be our Jira home directory.
Step 3: Set Up Environment Variable
Next, you must set the JIRA_HOME environment variable to point to your Jira home directory. This process varies depending on your operating system:
On Windows:
Open the Control Panel > System and Security > System > Advanced System Settings > Environment Variables. Then, click New under System Variables and enter JIRA_HOME as the Variable name and the path to your Jira home directory as the Variable value.
On Unix/Linux/Mac:
You set up the environment variable by modifying the profile file of the user who will be running Jira. Open the .bash_profile file in a text editor and append the following lines:
export JIRA_HOME=/path/to/your/jira/home
export PATH=$PATH:$JIRA_HOME/bin
Step 4: Start Jira
Finally, to start your Jira instance, navigate to the bin directory inside your Jira home directory in the command line and execute the start-jira.sh or start-jira.bat file based on your operating system:
cd $JIRA_HOME/bin
./start-jira.sh
That’s it! You can now access your locally running Jira instance at http://localhost:8080 in your web browser. Enjoy Jira in your local environment!
Remember to stop your Jira instance when you are done. This can be done by running the stop-jira.sh or stop-jira.bat script in the same directory.
Thanks for reading. Stay tuned for more tech tips and guides!