Local Jira server install: Unable to search: “An unknown error occurred while trying to performa search”

On starting up my VM where I have Jira installed, all my logged issues are not displaying, and there’s errors about searching and indexing:

On the Admin / Advanced / Indexing page it shows:

This page on search and indexing issues and a number of other pages and articles talk about deleting the temp Lucene index and cache files, but the docs and other posts miss the important part of stating where these files are.

This page gives a good overview of the file structure of Jira, but doesn’t talk about the Lucene indexes.

This page talks about deleting the Lucene indexed at $JIRA_HOME/caches/ but doesn’t say where $JIRA_HOME points to. It isn’t the /opt/atlassian/jira directory structure mentioned by the previous article, but there isn’t a caches there or anywhere below that directory.

Not knowing where else to look, I just did a find from the root for ‘caches’ and found the location elsewhere here:

$ sudo find . -type d -name caches

./var/atlassian/application-data/jira/caches

Ok. Stopping my server with

sudo /etc/init.d/jira stop

and then moving the caches/indexes folder to indexes-old, retstarting Jira with:

sudo /etc/init.d/jira start

and now there’s a new error about Lucene:

Ok. Clicking the Find out More link shows the results of this health check:

Clicking the How do I resolve this link takes you to this page, which suggests to do a re-index, which is from the Admin / Advanced / Indexing page and where I got the second error originally. Going back there and trying the ‘lock and re-index’ option which was recommended in some of the other index related issus posts:

I then got this:

Ok, no errors! Let’s see if my logged issues are back.

They’re back! Now I’m back in business!

 

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.