How to deal with leftover app jar files after uninstalling from UI

Question

Hi fellow Community members!

My question is simple: when I unsinstall an app from the UI and Jira is being restarted later I often notice the app is installed again when looking at the manage apps page. Does anyone else experience this behavior?

I'm quite sure this happens because the plugin .jar file remains in the installed-plugins directory.

Another thing I notice is a lot of older jar files after a plugin has been updated. Here is an example:

ls -al installed-plugins/ | grep jira-misc
-rwxrwxr-x 1 jira jira 11515978 Aug 11 12:58 plugin.8158756660257786115.jira-misc-workflow-extensions-6.6.1.jar
-rwxrwxr-x 1 jira jira 10760795 Aug 6 15:49 plugin.8944103389415008213.jira-misc-workflow-extensions-5.6.2.jar

This happens for all other jar files including  jira-servicedesk-* and jira-software-* files. For some I even have 3 different versions in the installed-plugins directory

ls -al installed-plugins/ | grep jira-servicedesk-application
-rwxrwxr-x 1 jira jira 3149184 Aug 6 15:49 jira-servicedesk-application-3.15.1.jar
-rwxrwxr-x 1 jira jira 3050568 Aug 6 15:49 jira-servicedesk-application-4.12.2.jar
-rwxrwxr-x 1 jira jira 3050572 Aug 11 12:11 jira-servicedesk-application-4.13.1.jar

I don't think a manual cleanup of this directory is necessary in normal circumstances.

Charlie Misonne · Answer

Hi Nic!

Thanks for your reply and clarifying this. I will check the plugin status in the database next time.

Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Answer

Most of the Atlassian applications do actually leave the old versions lying around when you upgrade the apps or even remove them.  Most of the time, it's harmless, they just take up a bit of disk space, and people like me do a bit of housekeeping the next time we do an upgrade of the application.

But re-enabling them shouldn't happen when you restart.  If you remove an app (not just disable, but fully remove), the restart shouldn't pick up the old version and reload it, it does have a record that an app was there and should know not to load it from installed-plugins.  Sounds like there is something wrong here.