Normally, when you run atlas-clean command, you loose JIRA configuration and have to start over when you run your development instance again. Luckily there’s a way to keep both your JIRA configuration and log4j settings after cleaning the target directory.

These instructions have been tested in JIRA 7.13.9.

Even though it’s a documented feature of Atlassian SDK, I learned about it in the JIRA Development Cookbook by Jobin Kuruvilla. It’s a great book to learn the basics when starting JIRA development.

Let’s see how to keep JIRA settings first and then the log4j settings.

Keeping JIRA settings

Here’s what you need to do:

1. stop your JIRA instance, if it’s running.
2. run atlas-create-home-zip in the root directory of your project. This creates a file named generated-test-resources.zip in \target\jira\ subdirectory.
3. copy the generated-test-resources.zip file to \src\test\resources.
4. edit project’s pom.xml and add the following line to the jira-maven-plugin (or maven-jira-plugin depending on your AMPS version) configuration section: <productDataPath>${project.basedir}/src/test/resources/generated-test-resources.zip</productDataPath>

Here’s how the plugin configuration looks like in pom.xml:

<build>
    <plugins>
        <plugin>
            <groupId>com.atlassian.maven.plugins</groupId>
            <artifactId>jira-maven-plugin</artifactId>
            <version>${amps.version}</version>
            <extensions>true</extensions>
            <configuration>
                <productVersion>${jira.version}</productVersion>
                <productDataVersion>${jira.version}</productDataVersion>
                <productDataPath>${project.basedir}/src/test/resources/generated-test-resources.zip</productDataPath>
                <!-- ... -->
            </configuration>
        </plugin>
    </plugins>
</build>

Any time you do any configuration changes to JIRA, just generate a new generated-test-resources.zip file and copy it to the \src\test\resources directory.

Keeping log4j settings

Keeping log4j settings is similar:

1. run your JIRA development instance at least once. A log4j.properties file will be generated in \target\jira\webapp\WEB-INF\classes\ directory.
2. copy the file into \src\test\resources directory.

3. make necessary changes to the log4j.properties in your test\resources directory. For example, to enable DEBUG level logging to both console and log file for com.test.jira.plugins package, add the following lines at the end of the file:

   log4j.logger.com.test.jira.plugins = DEBUG, console, filelog log4j.additivity.com.test.jira.plugins = false

4. edit project’s pom.xml and add the following line to the jira-maven-plugin (or maven-jira-plugin depending on your AMPS version) configuration section: <log4jProperties>${project.basedir}/src/test/resources/log4j.properties</log4jProperties>

Here’s how the plugin configuration looks like in pom.xml, including the productDataPath configuration from previous section:

<build>
    <plugins>
        <plugin>
            <groupId>com.atlassian.maven.plugins</groupId>
            <artifactId>jira-maven-plugin</artifactId>
            <version>${amps.version}</version>
            <extensions>true</extensions>
            <configuration>
                <productVersion>${jira.version}</productVersion>
                <productDataVersion>${jira.version}</productDataVersion>
                <productDataPath>${project.basedir}/src/test/resources/generated-test-resources.zip</productDataPath>
                <log4jProperties>${project.basedir}/src/test/resources/log4j.properties</log4jProperties>
                <!-- ... -->
            </configuration>
        </plugin>
    </plugins>
</build>

And that’s it. This is one of the first things I do when creating a new project and setting up JIRA after the first execution.