modifications to server.xml are overwrite after every update

[HollaDieWaldfee]

Hello,

after every update from jira, jira service desk or confluence the individual changes of the server.xml files are overwrite with the default server.xml file on my linux system. (/opt/atlassian/jira/conf/server.xml)

So i have to made this individual changes after every upgrade manually to the server.xml file again.

Is there any possible solution to save them for ever?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

The "solution" is to do what you're doing - keep a copy and apply changes back into the new one after each upgrade.

The installer would need a lot of coding to be able to this itself - it would have to be able to read your server.xml and understand all the changes you have made to it (and why) and re-apply all of them into the new version.  Quite a challenge when the format of the file changes or you've got a lot of unusual customisations

[Craig Castle-Mead]

To add to Nick’s reply, be cautious if you think an “easy” approach is just copying your current server.xml and then replacing the installer version to get your customizations back as sometimes there are other changes in these files that you’ll want to keep.

To ensure or customizations are maintained (across more files than just server.xml), we’ve implemented Puppet (puppet.com) across our environments and it will implement any changes we specify on top of the installer base version. This does take quite some effort to implement and is absolutely worth it for our scale, but using augeas (augtool on the command line) is a great step towards ensuring consistency 

https://linux.die.net/man/1/augtool

CCM

[Italo Qualisoni [e-Core]]

I totally agree with Nic and Craig.

It's expected that these file might changes during an upgrade.

One change introduced in JIRA 8 that I've caused a lot of issue is  Jira server startup fails with Tomcat misconfigured error that has included two attributes  (relaxedQueryChars and relaxedPathChars ) to the connectors in server.xml and due some file customization these two attributes were removed and prevented the application to start.

[HollaDieWaldfee]

thx for this helpfull answers.

At the moment i have an PDF Document for each server.xml (Jira, Jira Service Desk, Confluence...) with my configuration and after the update i go to the server.xml and change only the specific lines as it is in my PDF Document manually.

It's just 5 minutes work each installation, but i hoped that i can automated this. But i understand that this is the safest way i can do it.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

I tend to keep them under source control, and run a diff when I do the first test run of the upgrade - a diff tool tells me when changes need reapplying and where, and some can do some of them automatically (usually the less complex changes)