How to use Jira on Azure with Student Pack

Ömer Gülen
Aug 31, 2018 · 5 min read

Why Jira?

Hello people! I’d like to start my article by informing you why we need such a thing.
Jira is a project and task management software. Reason why we prefer it is that Jira is more effective than its alternatives. Such as Trello, which was satisfactory at first, but it handled the “sprints” poorly after deciding to use Scrum method. Also, we have Asana. Asana was handling the subtasks well, but unfortunately it wasn’t supporting Scrum methodology. Hence, Jira is our best choice.

There are 3 payment and set-up options. First is Jira’s own cloud support, which costs 10 dollars per month, it is the easiest way. Second is using the Jira Software Data Center on Azure, which is more expensive than our solution. Keep in mind that it requires D or F series virtual machine and they’re not supported by Azure for Students. Last one is setting it up it in my own virtual machine which is provided by Azure for Students. It requires only 10 dollar one-time payment for Jira. What we are going to use is last one.

So let’s get started to build not the easiest but the cheapest solution.


Creating the VM

Create Ubuntu Server 18.04 VM with following specifications:

  • There is no need to select SSD, so choose Standart HDD.
  • We don’t need to use public SSH, so I chose the password option. (The one that I will use to log in with SSH.)
  • Subscription “Azure for Students”.
  • I create a resource group named “Jira”.
  • Location depends on you, your choice is the best. I use EU West.

In the next step, I am going to choose a virtual machine type. I can select one from B1s — BS Series because in Azure for Students provides 750 per month for free. (B1ms is my fav.)

Adding inbound security rule for Jira
  • In the third part of the creating VM, I only change one thing. Change Network Security Group to Advanced. Then click to Network Security Group Firewall and on the right tab, Add an inbound rule (Add an endpoint) to let our requests react to our Virtual Machine.
  • Then just click to the Create button on the fourth page and wait for the deployment.

Preparation

There isn’t too much preparation work you need to do on the Linux VMs before installation, but I would recommend the basics. Harden your Linux installation then update and upgrade your machine with:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

For Jira itself, the only thing you need is a good database installed. I would recommend either Postgres or MariaDB. For this post, I’ll be using Postgres.

sudo apt-get install postgresql-all
sudo su postgres

When you install Postgres, a postgres user (linux user) is automatically created, and your database commands will need to go through it. Just to jump ahead a little, I’ll create a user and database for JIRA.
Note: I won’t be diving into securing a Postgres install.

psql -c "CREATE ROLE jirauser LOGIN PASSWORD 'jirapassword'";
psql -c "CREATE DATABASE jiradb OWNER jirauser";
exit

You can check if the command works with the outputs. In the first command it should return “CREATE ROLE” and in the second one “CREATE DATABASE”.

Also, as part of this step, we can download JIRA (on Azure, this equates to about 329MB downloaded in 8.3 seconds for me) and then make them executable (the lucky way — 777).

sudo wget https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/downloads/binary/atlassian-jira-software-7.12.0-x64.bin
sudo chmod 777 *

Note: It’s the latest version for now, but if it is not when you are using. Just go to Jira Download page. Choose Linux 64 Bit, right-click the Download button and copy the address, then change it with the one above.


Installing Jira

JIRA’s installation is really straightforward. Download and run.

sudo ./atlassian-jira-software-7.12.0-x64.bin

During the installation process, accept all the defaults with “Enter” unless you have a specific reason not to. Once everything is installed, you can navigate in your browser to your VM’s IP address followed by the public port you picked for JIRA in your Azure endpoint selection (e.g. http://191.236.60.25:8080/).

The following images step through the procedure for selecting a custom database (not the built-in one, which is not intended for production).

Choosing manual setup
Database setup
Final steps
You can manually insert your License Key or just go to MyAtlassian and generate a Jira trial license it will come back when you choose and fill it out
Generating trial license
Happy ending

Thanks for reading my tutorial. If you want to add or fix something, feel free to comment below or send an e-mail.

Also, special thanks to Irem Kaya for helping out with the structure, punctuation, grammar, and her general editing skills.

Happy coding.

Ömer Gülen

Written by

Developer & Designer

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