I’m trying to set up JIRA on my Ubuntu VPS but running into issues. When I try to access the application through my browser, I get this error message:
Failed to establish jira.home folder at '/var/atlassian/application-data/jira'. Check the documentation for configuring your JIRA home folder properly.
I did the installation using root privileges. Here’s what I see when checking the directory permissions:
root@server:/var/atlassian/application-data# ls -la
total 4.0K
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4.0K May 17 22:29 jira
The folder exists and seems to have the right permissions, but JIRA still can’t use it. Has anyone encountered this before? What am I missing in the configuration?
Ownership’s probably your problem. JIRA doesn’t run as root - it uses its own user account (usually ‘jira’ or ‘atlassian’). Run ps aux | grep jira to see which user it’s actually running as. Then fix the ownership with chown -R jira:jira /var/atlassian/application-data/jira. I hit this exact same issue when I deployed JIRA at work. The directory got created during install but the service couldn’t write to it because of the ownership mismatch. Fixed the ownership and it worked perfectly.
make sure jira has write access to that folder. ownership seems fine, but maybe try chmod 755 /var/atlassian/application-data/jira as a precaution. also, look for a jira-home.properties file; it might lead to a diffrent directory than your setup.