Over the last couple of weeks I have taken on the interesting task of installing the Atlassian Suite for my open source development site Open Source Battlefield. Particularly during the last week I have taken this up a level and powered through this with vigor and have essentially been banging my head against a brick wall.

Before I continue, the task I have set out to do is install the following:

• Crowd – Atlassian’s Centralised User Management Software
• JIRA – Atlassian’s Bug Tracking and Project Management Software
• Greenhopper – Atlassian’s Agile Project Management Plugin for JIRA
• and finally Confluence – Atlassian’s Wiki Software

I began my journey with the Atlassian “Here Be Dragon’s Quest” and I found it was an excellent starter to assist in getting my head around Tomcat and how I could set up Confluence, JIRA, GreenHopper, and Crowd. However due to a memory constraints on the server I wanted to roll the three applications into a single Tomcat instance on my server. For the average Tomcat admin this may seem like a simple task however for me… a person that has never touched Tomcat with a 10 foot pole, it wasn’t as easy as I was hoping.

In steps Scott Herdman a good mate of mine from uni who has been helping me greatly with this little project of mine as he has administered Tomcat and the Atlassian products before. (Oh and for the record he was the one who told me I should document my experiences for others to hopefully learn from (and granted… he is right it IS why I have this blog) so therefore he gets this free plug).

Scott has been answering questions on and off for me and the circle of my learning has gone something along the lines of:

Problem –> Read Error Logs –> Search Google –> Re-Read the Atlassian Guides –> Search Google Some More –> Read the Error Logs Again –> Beg Scott for some assistance –> and back round to the beginning for the next problem.

After many MANY trials of getting the Atlassian Suite up and running in a single Tomcat instance I decided that they have made the recommendation for them to be installed separately for a reason. Unfortunately it appears that due to conflicts in the libraries that are included with each application in order to get them to all run on the one Tomcat server would require a lot of tweaking and careful petting LOL of which I don’t have the time for.

So if you are starting out, and have little experience with Tomcat, I hope that I can save you some time and effort straight up… don’t try to roll your own Tomcat, just use the ones included with each application it will save you a good few weeks.

So this is why I have really not been around much. After my exams are over next week I will be back more and have a few interesting ideas for things I can post about but for the moment I am off to play with my swanky new Atlassian Suite. For reference I got it set up as Open Source Battlefield Home (Confluence) and Open Source Battlefield JIRA. Crowd is installed as well but really has no use of being included here LOL.

If anyone else has experiences with Atlassian I would love to hear your thoughts.

Stuart