Jira upgrade 4.3 to 4.4.3 fails on backup and on upgrade

[Maxime Lemanissier]

Hi all,

I'm currently upgrading Jira 4.3 to 4.4.3.

Jira is running as standalone on a Linux 64 bits.

I tried to apply the automatic upgrade process.

When Jira tries to backup its install directory, it fails with :

Your instance of JIRA is currently being upgraded.
Shutting down JIRA...
Checking if JIRA has been shutdown...
Backing up the JIRA installation directory
com.install4j.runtime.beans.actions.files.CreateZipFileAction failed

Ignore [i, Enter], Quit [q]

I quitted, backed up install dir and workspace by myself, and then rerun the upgrade process without asking for backup. This time, I got :

Your instance of JIRA is currently being upgraded.
Checking if JIRA has been shutdown...
Deleting the previous JIRA installation directory...
Error while attempting to remove the previous installation directory. Some files may be in use. Please close all related programs and try again.
Ignore [i, Enter], Retry [r], Quit [q]

After this, jira install dir is empty. I rolled back manually thanks to the backup I did before.

I'm not administrator of this server, my "jira" user (from which i'm running Jira and the upgrade process) has only the write permissions in its home and in jira install dir and workspace. This may be the reason of these problems.

Is there someone having the same problems? Do you solve them?

Do you know if jira upgrade process logs some detailled messages about its failures?

Thanks,

Maxime

[Maxime Lemanissier · Accepted solution]

Ok, the problem is solved. It was indeed due to the lack of write permission in parent folder.

To fix this, as i could not give write permission to the current parent folders, I created new intermediate folders for jira install and home directories.

The upgrade process ran successfully after this.

[Dave C]

I realise this is an old question, however it is the top Google result, hence updating it. I've written a KB for this scenario, Upgrade of JIRA fails due to Error while attempting to remove the previous installation directory.

Cheers

[Gregory Sudderth]

I don't want to pick, but the scripts will also go beserk of you don't have "execute" (the "x") in the permissions too. This manifests when you do a "ls" and get this:

ls: .: Permission denied

[Sander Brienen [Avisi]]

Having only write permission is a bit odd. You should at least have read AND write permission in the directory where Jira is installed. Otherwise the upgrade tool cannot create the zip file or delete and copy the application files.

Check if your existing installation has some files hanging around that are owned by a different user (e.g. root). That can sometimes happen if an administrator starts jira with his own account. Especialy log-files are then owned by some other user.

[Maxime Lemanissier]

Hi Sander,

Yes, jira user also has the read permission. I was meaning that it can *only* write to these folders.

Here are the content of the install dir :

jira@factory-server-01:/data/jira-4.3$ ll
total 64
drwxr-xr-x 13 jira jira 4096 2011-11-11 10:42 ./
drwxr-xr-x 14 ci ci 4096 2011-10-20 09:25 ../
drwxr-xr-x 16 jira jira 4096 2011-11-11 10:42 atlassian-jira/
drwxr-xr-x  2 jira jira 4096 2011-11-11 10:42 bin/
drwxr-xr-x  2 jira jira 4096 2011-11-11 10:42 conf/
drwxr-xr-x  2 jira jira 4096 2011-11-11 10:42 external-source/
drwxr-xr-x  2 jira jira 4096 2011-11-11 10:42 lib/
drwxr-xr-x  2 jira jira 4096 2011-11-11 10:42 licenses/
drwxr-xr-x  2 jira jira 4096 2011-11-11 10:43 logs/
-rw-r--r--  1 jira jira  556 2011-11-11 10:42 NOTICE
-rw-r--r--  1 jira jira 3968 2011-11-11 10:42 README.html
-rw-r--r--  1 jira jira 2134 2011-11-11 10:42 README.txt
drwxr-xr-x  4 jira jira 4096 2011-11-11 15:10 temp/
drwxr-xr-x  2 jira jira 4096 2011-11-11 10:42 tomcat-docs/
drwxr-xr-x  2 jira jira 4096 2011-11-11 10:42 webapps/
drwxr-xr-x  3 jira jira 4096 2011-11-11 10:42 work/

Everything in this folder is owned by jira user but not the parent folder, where jira user does not have write permission.

If the upgrade process tries to delete and recreate the install folder, it will fail with these permissions.