Jira software Docker containter fails to start due to file permission issue.

[Charlie Misonne]

I am unable to start Jira properly with the image provided by Atlassian. This worked in the past.

docker pull atlassian/jira-software:8.5.1
docker run atlassian/jira-software:8.5.1

Apparently the image does not set all file permissions properly to run Jira as the jira user. Log file says:

SEVERE [Catalina-startStop-1] org.apache.catalina.startup.HostConfig.beforeStart Unable to create directory for deployment: [/opt/atlassian/jira/conf/Catalina/localhost]

I don't remember having this problem a couple of weeks ago...

 Anyone else experiencing issues with this?

[Mandeep Kaur]

Looks like they updated the image, I dont see above error anymore but jira docker container did not start at all. Works when i start it manually by running ./start-jira.sh from within the container.

[radhika.punchepady]

Did you resolve this issue? Might be that automatic start have not mentioned the right user

[Mandeep Kaur]

Yes, I am experiencing this when running jira 8.7.0.

[Charlie Misonne]

Thanks for your answer, glad I'm not the only one.

[Mandeep Kaur]

Were you able to resolve this ? Any workarounds?

[radhika.punchepady]

any solution found?

[Charlie Misonne]

The reason my Jira was not reachable was another issue and not related to the image.

I was confused by that SEVERE error but apparently it was not the root cause of my issue.

Jira tries to use {{/opt/atlassian/jira/conf/Catalina/localhost}} and when it fails creates this directory instead which does work: {{/opt/atlassian/jira/work/Catalina/localhost}}

At least that's how I understand it.
I replied the the Atlassian support ticket to get some more feedback.

[radhika.punchepady]

Hi Charlie, Thanks for responding. I was also confused with this error message and overlooked the actual issue. Mine was related to some DB configuration.  The actual issue didn't give any error message in log and hence I was stuck trying to fix the severe error.

[Dave Chevell]

I can't replicate any actual startup issues with our Jira image - I can confirm the SEVERE warning appears, however as noted above this doesn't actually cause any issues. (Incidentally I believe this is unrelated to the Docker build, and can be seen with vanilla Jira installs as well - something to look into, but not in the scope of Docker)

Can anyone actually reproduce an issue impacting the startup of any of the atlassian/jira-* images? 

[Charlie Misonne]

Pasting the reply from Atlassian Support here.

After running some research, it turns out that the folder /opt/atlassian/jira/conf/Catalina/localhost is created as part of the tomcat deployment state machine and Jira doesn't rely on it. As you mentioned earlier, in the docker file, Jira user is being granted with the right permissions to the needed folders:

&& chown -R ${RUN_USER}:${RUN_GROUP}            ${JIRA_INSTALL_DIR}/logs     
&& chown -R ${RUN_USER}:${RUN_GROUP}            ${JIRA_INSTALL_DIR}/temp     
&& chown -R ${RUN_USER}:${RUN_GROUP}            ${JIRA_INSTALL_DIR}/work 

The folder ${JIRA_INSTALL_DIR}/conf is not important for Jira and that's why the system still starts correctly even when Jira doesn't have permissions to it. Please note that this error is not restricted to Docker use, it is also logged when using any standard Jira installation where the installation directories are owned by root. However, in the case of Docker, the commands mentioned above fix the permission issue to permit Jira to start properly. At this point, you may ignore this false SEVERE. We are exploring further internally to check a way to remove this confusion from the log.

In short: it logs a SEVERE error indeed, even for non-docker installations but it can be ignored.

@Dave Chevell I think we were all focused on this SEVERE error while it was something else causing the start-up issues of the dockerized application. (for me at least)