Plugin Errors When Starting Jira Server

[rgordon-sg]

As part of the process to upgrade our Jira Server (currently 7.1) to newer versions, I am trying to copy our production instance data to our test instance. I plan to test the upgrade process on the test instance before I dare do anything with our production instance.

Our test instance is a copy of the production instance from years ago, so much of the data and plugins on production do not exist in test.

I restored an sql backup of the production instance into the test instance database. When I try to start the test instance, I get log errors like this:

2019-05-28 14:25:56,014 JIRA-Bootstrap ERROR [c.a.p.osgi.factory.OsgiPluginInstalledHelper] Cannot determine required plugins, cannot resolve bundle 'com.appfusions.atlassian.google-plus-signin'

Based on that, I think, I need to copy the plugins in jira home/plugins/installed-plugins from production into test. Doing that does NOT fix the problem.

Since I don't need that particular plugin in test, I remove its associated *.jar file from the installed-plugins folder on test. Still see the same errors when I try to start jira.

I cleaned up the plugins/.bundled-plugins and plugins/.osgi-plugins, but that doesn't fix the problem.

I try to start jira with the disable-addons argument

/opt/atlassian/jira/bin/start-jira.sh --disable-addons=com.appfusions.atlassian.google-plus-signin:com.appfusions.googlesso.jira:com.appfusions.license-validator

..but that doesn't seem to have any effect (perhaps my version of Jira doesn't support those).

So it seems like the data in the database is requiring these plugins that can't be loaded, but it is not clear how I can startup jira to be able to disable those plugins within the database data.

Is there a better way to spin up a copy of my production instance for upgrade testing?

[Andy Heinzer · Accepted solution]

Hi Rob,

Sorry to hear you are having troubles trying to upgrade Jira here.   I am not familiar with this specific plugin you mentioned, but I did some searching and I think I found some more info about it.

It seems this plugin is not currently in our Marketplace site, but I found it over on in the vendor page of https://docs.appfusions.com/display/GAPPSAUTHJ/Home

From looking at the download page for this one:

https://docs.appfusions.com/display/GAPPSAUTHJ/Downloads+and+Notes

It certainly appears that this vendor has not updated this plugin beyond Jira 7.3 versions from reading on that page.  Which is unfortunate for your upgrade process here as it looks like you will need to abandon this plugin in order to complete the upgrade.  You could try to reach out to them on that contact section:

If additional questions on the brief release notes, please contact us and we can provide more detail from our change list records.

From looking at the download section, I noticed that the latest version isn't just a single jar file, but rather an obr.  An OBR file is another way to install a plugin in Jira, it provides the ability to add other dependencies according to some developer documentation on the subject.  So that does help to explain why removing this one jar file still generates this error.  Most likely you still have some other jar file that is loading up when Jira starts that could be trying to load dependencies that it can't find or that cannot be loaded in this newer Jira version.

Instead of copying the entire contents of the $JIRAHOME/plugins/install-plugins/ folder from the production to the test upgrade, for the sake of testing an upgrade like this, it's probably best to leave that plugin folder as it was.  All the plugins you had in that folder will most likely need an update to be compatible with newer Jira versions and their existence in that folder on startup can prevent Jira itself from starting.

So try emptying that installed-plugins folder or at least leave it with the default plugins, and then start Jira.  Immediately after Jira is finished starting up, I would recommend going to the UPM in Jira (In Jira 8 versions you can get there by going to the Cog Icon -> Manage Apps -> then go to Fine new apps).  This feature will require your Jira site to have internet connectivity to be able to download updated versions of these plugins from marketplace, but I think this would be a better method to update the plugins.  The UPM in Jira won't let you install an incompatible plugin, so it can help to avoid that problem.

Perhaps you can find an alternative plugin in Marketplace to replace the functionality of your other SSO plugin.

I hope this helps, please let me know if you have any follow up concerns about this upgrade.

Andy

[rgordon-sg]

Yeah. Since I first posted this I have resigned myself to having to spin up a clean jira instance, then install the necessary plug-ins, then try to restore from the database backup.

Thanks for following up on this though.