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Should I use JIRA Standalone or WAR/EAR version?

Jari Kokkonen

We have been successfully running JIRA WAR/EAR for a year or so and now I am wondering that should we change to Standalone version instead.

It is not clear to me what are the benefits of using WAR/EAR version in the first place, considering the fact that Atlassian's recommended installation is Standalone which also has more sophisticated upgrade automation - what I have understood.

Can someone please point out the differences on these two?

Regards,

Jari

Accepted answers

Nic Brough -Adaptavist-

The WAR installation is the more useful one for any serious user, because you aren't relying on Atlassian to provide the application server.

Basic decision is simple though - if you want Jira to work with a minimum of fuss and you have no concerns around patching, updates, or using a fixed version of Tomcat, then use Standalone. If you don't want to be stuck with the Tomcat version in standalone, or you don't want to use Tomcat at all, use the WAR.

Swapping between the installations is easy though. Prepare a new empty target system, clone the jira-home attachments and plugins into the new jira-home directory, and then either export and import the xml, or tell the new Jira server to use the existing database. Sort out the licenses (use a developer or evaluation one to get the new Jira running) and you're done. And don't forget the backups. Never forget the backups.

All comments

Mikael Löwenadl

The stand-alone installation is always the prefered one. The war/ear packaging is just a way to install Jira in an existing app server, for those people that dont want to admin yet another server.

I guess its a bit more messy to configure Jira if not running in its own sandbox (stand-alone).

Jari Kokkonen

Are there any instructions on how to change from existing WAR/EAR to Standalone installation without losing data or having to re-configure everything from scratch?

Nic Brough -Adaptavist-

The WAR installation is the more useful one for any serious user, because you aren't relying on Atlassian to provide the application server.

GilesG

Hi JariAtWork,

Are there any instructions on how to change from existing WAR/EAR to Standalone installation without losing data or having to re-configure everything from scratch?

If you want to follow a procedure for changing from an existing WAR to a Standalone installation, you could try following the Upgrading JIRA Manually procedure. If the criteria at the top of that page doesn't suit your particular situation - e.g. you're running a JIRA WAR distribution prior to version 4.0, then please follow the Migrating JIRA to Another Server procedure instead.

You can use those procedures to go from a specific version of a JIRA WAR installation to the same or later version of a JIRA Standalone installation. (In other words, these procedures will fail if you attempt to go to an earlier version of JIRA Standalone.)

Following on from Nic's comment, please also be aware that if you wish to install the JIRA WAR distribution, the JIRA 4.4 Supported Platforms page indicates that JIRA only supports the Apache Tomcat 5.5 and 6.0 application servers. This has been the case since the release of JIRA version 4.3.

Hence, while recent versions of the JIRA WAR distribution may work with other app servers, Atlassian only provides support for the app servers that JIRA supports and does not test JIRA against unsupported application servers.

Hope this information helps.

Cheers,

Giles.

Colin Goudie

If you have made custom modifications to the Atlassian applications then generally the ear/war files are so much easier to update. As you can version control just your differences and build them into the war using their build scripts. Then simply stop your app server, replace the war, start, and you are upgraded.

The installer they have built now for Confluence and JIRA probably help somewhat here but I find using ear/war files easier in most situations as even the installers you will need to copy images etc.. over.