Database: JIRA couldn't connect to your database

[Corey Manshack]

I'm having an issue with Jira using mysql. It was working flawlessly but now after migrating this stack to a different machine it quit working. I can login just fine to mysql with the credentials in dbconfig.xml. The host and port are returning mysql login prompts when I telnet to them so I'm stumped as to where I need to look next to solve this problem.

[Josh Steckler · Accepted solution]

Try replacing "localhost" with 127.0.0.1, that's worked for me a couple times.

Also, can you check the logs for Jira and post what message you're getting?

[Corey Manshack]

Logs just kept saying there was something wrong with the credentials. I erased the password and repasted it and worked. Very odd because, it was the same password, nothing changed. I rsynced everything on this machine directly from the other working machine.

[Andy Heinzer]

Thanks for posting back with your solution.  That is very strange.  The database password would be stored in cleartext in the dbconfig.xml file.  I'm curious if perhaps you were changing between operating systems (Windows to Linux or vice versa) and if these two operating systems were using different character encodings for certain characters.

Without revealing your database credentials, does your username/password for the database contain any special characters?   Anything aside the common characters of A-Z, a-z, 0-9, !@#$%^&*()-_;',. character sets?

[Andy Heinzer]

MySQL is the one supported database for Jira that Atlassian cannot bundle the database driver for (due to licensing restrictions).   Instead you, as the admin of your system, have to download this jdbc driver separately from MySQL's site and copy this .jar file into your $JIRAINSTALL/lib/ folder and restart Jira, before Jira can make any connections to that database type.

This is explained in the Connecting Jira to MySQL database documentation.

Also when you download the driver, make sure you get the JDBC Connector/J 5.1 version, and not the 6.x or 8.x jdbc driver versions.  Jira won't work with these newer database/drivers yet.

[Corey Manshack]

mysql-connector-java-5.1.34-bin.jar already exists in this directory.

[Celtis Omaris]

This really helped thanks,

I had upgraded my DB from 5.7 to 8 and didn't update the .jar and when I did, poof, it worked