JIRA is a 'web application', meaning it runs centrally on a server, and users interact with it through web
browsers from any computer.
JIRA Client Requirements
1. Browser:
JIRA will work with most modern browsers:
- Internet Explorer 6 and 7
- Firefox 1.5 and 2.x
- Safari (latest version)
- Opera (latest version)
All of the main functionality will work in IE 5.5; however, some of the visual effects will be missing, as IE 5.5 is becoming
quite dated and does not support web standards that are in common use today.
Note
To get the full experience JIRA has to offer, you should enable Javascript in your browser. If Javascript is disabled
you will still be able to use all the main functionality of JIRA, but some features will not work (e.g.
adding issue types per project; the preview for the wiki renderer).
JIRA Server Requirements
1. Hardware:
During evaluation, JIRA will run well on any reasonably fast workstation computer (eg. 1.5+Ghz processor).
Memory requirements depend on how many projects and issues you will store,
but 256MB is enough for most evaluation purposes. (Note: most people start by installing JIRA Standalone on their local computer.
It is easy to move JIRA to a production server later.)
The hardware required to run JIRA in production depends mainly on the number of issues and users that your
installation will have, as well as the maximum number of concurrent requests that the system will experience
during peak hours.
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If you are planning to have a small number of projects (10-20) with 1,000 to 5,000 issues in total and about
100-200 users, a recent server (2.8+GHz CPU) with 256-512MB of available RAM should cater for your needs.
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If you are planning for a greater number of issues and users, adding more memory will help. We have reports
that allocating 1GB of RAM to JIRA is sufficient for 100,000 issues.
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If your system will experience a large number of concurrent requests, running JIRA on a multi-CPU machine
will increase the concurrency of processing the requests, and therefore speed up the response time.
For reference, jira.atlassian.com has over 33,000 issues and over 30,000 user accounts.
The system runs on a 64bit Quad processor. The server has 4 GB of memory with 1 GB dedicated to JIRA.
Please note that performance heavily depends on your usage pattern. As a general rule, if you wish to store more than
200,000 issues in JIRA we recommend that you set up separate instances of JIRA on different physical machines
and split your projects and issues between the instances. You can follow the instructions on
splitting a JIRA instance, if you need to convert an existing JIRA instance into multiple instances.
We would appreciate it if you let us know what hardware configuration works for you. Please create a ticket
in our support system with your hardware specification and mention the number
of users and issues in your JIRA installation.
Note
JIRA requires access to a local disk for certain functionality (e.g. if JIRA does not have read and write access to disk,
searching and attachments will not work).
2. Operating System:
JIRA runs on any operating system that supports Java (see below). If you're undecided, see our thoughts on OS
choice.
Please note:
- Users of Linux/UNIX: A dedicated user should be created to run JIRA, as JIRA runs as the user it is invoked under
and therefore can potentially be abused. Here is an example of how to create a dedicated user to run JIRA in Linux:
$ sudo /usr/sbin/useradd --create-home --home-dir /usr/local/jira --shell /bin/bash jira
- Users of IBM's i5 OS: JIRA Standalone (Tomcat) will not run due to startup script problems.
3. Java:
JIRA requires the Java Developers Kit (JDK) v1.4 or later to be installed on the server. Please
see Installing Java.
Currently Sun's JDK is available for Windows (32 bit + 64 bit), Solaris (SPARC + 32 bit + 64 bit) and Linux Platforms
(32 bit + 64 bit). If you are a Mac OSX user, Apple also provides a specific JDK
that has been optimised for its hardware and OS.
4. Application Server:
JIRA is a web application, so requires an application server.
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JIRA Standalone ships pre-configured with the Apache Tomcat
application server, which is a stable, light weight and fast performing server.
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JIRA WAR/EAR can be installed into any of the supported application servers
(provided they are compatible with your chosen operating system and JDK). Note that manual configuration will be required.
5. Database:
JIRA requires a relational database for storage of issue data. JIRA supports most relational
database servers, so we suggest using the one that you are most comfortable administering.
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JIRA Standalone ships pre-configured with the HSQLDB database, which is suitable for evaluation purposes.
HSQLDB is prone to database corruption. Before deploying to a production environment, we strongly recommend that you connect
JIRA Standalone to an enterprise database (see the list of supported databases).
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JIRA WAR/EAR can be connected to any of the supported databases,
provided they are compatible with your application server.
