Updating robots.txt is not working

[Dmitriy Burdin]

Following this article  I edit robots.txt in the $JIRA-INSTALL/atlassian-jira but it has no effect. When accessing by url in the browser I see the default JIRA robots.txt content:

User-agent: *

I tried to restart JIRA and even the whole machine - still no effect.

[Matthew Peronto]

I ran into this issue as well.

It appears as if the last 10 characters of the robots.txt is being chopped off!

If I use the following for robots.txt in the file:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /
# 123456789123456789

I see the following in the url

User-agent: * Disallow: / # 12345678

 I did a work-around by using this as my robots.txt

User-agent: *
Disallow: /
# 1234567

[Stephan Stahl]

Thanks for spotting this out @Matthew Peronto - I ran into exactly the same error.

Also: a long enough comment in front of the "actual" part seems to do the trick, too:

#0123456789012345678
User-agent: *
Disallow: /

So whenever a "minimum file length" is reached (48 characters for me, including linebreaks), the robots.txt seems to be delivered correctly.

I highly doubt this is a desired "standard behaviour"... @Kurtcebe Eroglu -> this might be added as side node to the mentioned KB article. This definitely does have impact on pages being found by search engines... (especially if the robots.txt is simply not "complete")

[Kurtcebe Eroglu]

Hi Dmitriy,

If you had previously changed Context path for JIRA and serving jira from a non-root location of your JIRA domain, you may be checking the wrong file. For example, assume context path is jira. Then you're serving jira at some address like jira.mycompany.com/jira. The file you are modifying is now served at jira.mycompany.com/jira/robots.txt, and you may be checking jira.mycompany.com/robots.txt. This may be robots.txt defined elsewhere, like your web server. As explained in the article, you may try to find and modify this file instead.

Regards.