Jira upgrade to 8.5.19 from 7.13.19 shows completed in atlassian-jira.log, but web UI never loads

Question

I'm working on upgrading our test Jira systems from 7.5.4 to 8.5.19 to nail down a solid procedure before tackling production. The upgrade path I've chosen is:

7.5.4 -> 7.6.17 -> 7.13.18 -> 8.5.19

The upgrades to 7.6.17 and subsequently 7.13.18 work without issue, and I'm able to access the web UI in both cases after the upgrade has completed. In this case, however, the atlassian-jira.log and catalina.out files indicate that the upgrade has been successful via the following messages:

JIRA 8.5.19 build: 805019 started. You can now access JIRA through your web browser.
Upgrade Succeeded! JIRA has been upgraded to build number 805009

but when I try to access the web UI, the page never finishes loading. When using the network inspector, it doesn't look like the request makes it past the initial GET. I tried the following command on the Jira server itself, and it never makes it past 'awaiting response...'

wget https://jira.domain.com

--2024-12-31 18:55:15-- https://jira.domain.com/ Resolving jira.domain.com (jira.domain.com)... x.x.x.x Connecting to jira.domain.com (jira.domain.com)|x.x.x.x|:443... connected. HTTP request sent, awaiting response...

I was very careful to copy any modifications made to setenv.sh and server.xml to the new files generated during upgrade installation, so I don't think this issue is related but I could be wrong. I also did not see this issue in any of the two previous intermediary upgrades, so I'm not sure what I could be missing. I know that 7.13.18 -> 8.5.19 is an acceptable upgrade path because they're both LTSC releases, so I don't think I'm missing any dependencies either. Can someone please assist me in identifying the next steps I should take to resolve this issue?

Thank you!

Herrick G. · Answer

Hello Stefan,

I was actually able to resolve this. After reading the catalina.out log again, I noted the following error:

SEVERE [main] org.apache.catalina.core.StandardService.startInternal Failed to start connector [Connector[AJP/1.3-8009]]
org.apache.catalina.LifecycleException: Protocol handler start failed
Caused by: java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: The AJP Connector is configured with secretRequired="true" but the secret attribute is either null or "". This combination is not valid.

After doing some research, it appears that when Apache Tomcat 8.5.51 or higher is paired Jira version 8+, the server.xml value 'secretRequired' is set to 'True' by default. I had to add 'secretRequired=false' to the AJP connector to get the web UI to load.

Now will need to do additional research to see if this is the config that we actually want, but it's a step in the right direction.

Thank you again for your assistance!

Stefan Stadler · Answer

Hi  @Herrick G.

the question I always check first is: Are you running some kind of reverse proxy in front of Jira? How did you do the upgrade and what is your type of installation - fat installation on which OS or Docker based? Typically there should be something mentioned in the logs even though the end of the log states everything to be completed. Maybe this is just the final message and the error that prevents you from accessing has not been considered "severe enough" or something like that.

Did you already inspect the entire log from the point you started upgrading?

Regards,

Stefan