How to disable preinstalled languages?

[NielsJ]

I want to disable all preinstalled language packs except English (US). How to do so?

[NielsJ · Accepted solution]

As far as I know there is no "nice" way to do that via the Configuration. You have to remove the language packs from the bundled plugins archive.

1. shutdown JIRA
2. go to <jira-install>/atlassian-jira/WEB-INF/classes/
3. open the archive atlassian-bundled-plugins.zip
4. remove the desired language packs (the languages start with jira-language-pack or jira-languages - see screenshot)
5. save the archive
6. start JIRA

Then only the still existing languages are available in the administration panel (see screenshot).

Attention: You should always leave the en_UK language pack active to work as a fallback. There are often untranslated messages in other languages (e.g. German). If no english "baseline" is available you will see some cryptic keys in the frontend.

Contents of the bundled plugins archive:

[Roger Weinheimer]

How about disabling specific language pack plugins in UPM? ( Atlassian JIRA (v5.0#713-sha1:aec58e2) )

[Norman Abramovitz]

I tried that and it did not work. It took it away from the screen but next time I logged into administrator the disabled languages were back.

[NielsJ]

I think that's because these languages are bundled and cannot be disabled via OSGi. Deleting them in the filesystem is relable :-)