JIRA 3 plugin development environment howto

It’s quite hard to set up a JIRA 3 plugin development environment now, after JIRA 4 has been released. But the maven-based JIRA 4 PDK can be used to bootstrap such an environment. Here’s how!

1) Download the JIRA 4 PDK and unzip.
2) Set up the path as it’s described on the PDK page
3) Run the jira plugin skeleton creator in a fresh directory: atlassian-create-jira-plugin
4) Modify the created pom.xml file and change the JIRA master version and data version:

 <properties>
    <jira.version>3.13.5</jira.version>                                                                                      <jira.data.version>3.13</jira.data.version>
 </properties>

5) Run the atlas-run command in the created plugin directory. It will fail and give you the missing jars. You can google the files it’s missing and install as instructed.
6) After it’s done, you can run atlas-run and it will work. You’ll need a JIRA 3 license to use this. The admin user it requires is admin with password admin 
7) You need to fix the Indexing if it’s switched off. Under Administration in the web interface find Indexing under System group and set a correct relative directory (sometimes a double // appears there by default). After it successfully indexed everything, your good to go.