The JIRA Services team slashed a dragon

The goal of the quest is to get accustom with all of Atlassian’s product installation and integration process.  Another goal was to raise the quality of service when dealing with Atlassian partners.

During the 9 stages of the quest, the valliant system administrator will install JIRA, Confluence, GreenHopper, Crowd, FishEye, Crudible and Bamboo.

All of these system will use the Crowd SSO, JIRA and Confluence will share gadgets, Bamboo will integrate into JIRA…so in the end it’s an Atlassian software fest.

We did encounter multiple inaccuracy in the process suggested by Atlassian but having the GreenPepper’s lead developper François Dénommée and Minyaa’s creator Vincent Thoulé involved, it was impossible to fail.

The first thing we noticed during the adventure is that Atlassian seemed to underestimate the minimal requirement for all of these software to run.

With a minimum of 2GB of RAM, you might have JIRA and Confluence started and using Crowd, but once GreenHopper, Bamboo, FishEye and cie are started as well, 2GB just doesn’t seem to cut it.

So we used a virtual machine running Ubuntu 10.04 Server edition and assigned it 1 virtual CPU and 4GB of RAM.

An example of problem we faced was during JIRA’s installation. Running the config.sh shell script is suppose to configure the server.xml file and include information regarding the database for JIRA.

That script triggers a GUI to help the user in the configuration process. Since we used the Server edition of Ubuntu, we would receive an error message complaining that no X11 Display was set. The solution was simple, edit the server.xml file for JIRA manually but that process was not explained in the Here Be Dragons walkthrough.

By far the easiest part was installing GreenHopper, I guess that plugin was well built from the get go .

One product I discovered was crowd. Atlassian is offering a little more than just an SSO with product. I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it is to manage users, security group and application with Crowd.

The only drawback is memory as Crowd seems to be RAM hungry. But really, the ease of installation, integration with all the product mentioned earlier is worth the extra memory used on the server.

At the end of the day, this quest was longer than planned but not too boring for an installation procedure…and the dragon not so deadly.  Interesting that Atlassian still has the twist to make things different. If you have to choose an ALM provider, why not choosing the cool guy

Alexis

*All those sleek icons have been stolen from Atlassian’s web site.