Practical JIRA Plugins

Chapter 8. Further Plugin Information

Overview

This chapter covers topics that were more advanced than was appropriate for Chapter 1, or just didn’t fit neatly into any other chapter.

JIRA Plugins—Beyond the .jar file

Most JIRA plugins are deployed as a single .jar file that contains all the class files, Velocity template files, and other resources needed by the plugin. However, some plugins require other JIRA files to be created or modified at deployment time. These plugins will likely require a restart of JIRA for the changes to take effect.

Some of the kinds of changes that can require these extra steps are:

.jsp files

JSP files are a more complex alternative to Velocity template files and are used for many core JIRA web pages. Some plugins may want to use a copy of such a file with minor changes, rather than rewriting the template using Velocity.

System .xml files

For example, adding new email templates for custom JIRA events may require changes to the upgrade-system-event-types.xml file.

System .java files

Some plugins may even expect recompilation of modified JIRA source files in addition to deploying the plugin’s .jar file. For example, the standard JIRA Listener for email is always added when JIRA is restarted, unless the code that does this is modified. So custom Email Listener plugins will want to make that small change and recompile the JIRA source file.

Modifying any of the JIRA default Manager classes is another example of where small changes are sometimes easier to make in a ...