Eclipse Oxygen with Atlassian Connector plugin for accessing Jira issues

I’ve been kicking the tires in my local dev setup running my own Jira and GitLab installations. I’ve been meaning to take a look at how to access Jira tickets from within Eclipse, and then the next logical step is to look at the Jira to GitLab integration.

First up, let’s look at accessing Jira tickets in Eclipse. Docs on the Atlassian Connector are here: https://confluence.atlassian.com/ideplugin/atlassian-connector-for-eclipse. The installation guide gives an Eclipse Update Sites for Eclipse version up to Luna but not more recent versions (Mars, Neon, Oxygen), but questions online (e.g. here) suggest the Luna version still installs and works with Oxygen (using update site: http://update.atlassian.com/atlassian-eclipse-plugin/rest/e3.7)

Integration within Eclipse is using Mylyn. After installing the plugin by adding the update site above, open the Mylyn/Task Repository view:

and select the Jira option:

Press Next and enter the URL for your Jira server:

When prompted to create a new Query, select Yes – this is what retrieves your assigned tasks from Jira:

Press Next for the next dialog. There’s a lot of options here (continues below the area in this screenshot), but in this case I’m interested just in the issues logged for my Blackjack Twitterbot project, so I selected this specific project:

In my Task List view I can now see a list of my assigned tasks, open and competed:

Double-clicking any of these opens the ticket in Eclipse:

This is pretty typical of any issue ticket tracking support in Eclipse. At this point I can edit and update the tickets.

Next up, I’ll look at Jira and GitHub integration.

 

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!

 

Setting up a local production Jira installation with MySQL

Download the Jira server install from here.

Follow the steps here to download and add the JDBC driver to your Jira server. Download and copy the mysql connector jar to

/opt/atlassian/jira/lib/

Chose the ‘set up myself’ option, and complete the form to point to your already installed MySQL db instance:

Configure your install properties:

On the next screen you’ll be prompted for your license key, or head over to the Atlassian site to purchase or create a trial key. When you enter your organization name (above) on the license site it will pick up your site id.

Create an admin user, continue and now you’re up and running!