Installing the APR-based Tomcat Native Library for Jira on Debian 7 (Updated)
If you’re self-hosting Jira on Debian (or another platform, but this post is Debian specific) you might notice in the catalina.log file a line that reports something like this:
INFO: The APR based Apache Tomcat Native library which allows optimal performance in production environments was not found on the java.library.path: /usr/java/packages/lib/amd64:/usr/lib64:/lib64:/lib:/usr/lib
While this message isn’t a bug per se, but if you’re a completist like me, you’ll want to get it installed to speed up performance for Jira.
First up, you’ll want to install Apache Portable Runtime library along with OpenSSL, if you want to use SSL. Using the command line, we’ll install them with apt-get:
apt-get install libapr1-dev libssl-dev
Go through the process of installing the libraries by following the apt prompts. Note that the version of OpenSSL installed is 1.0.1e, but is patched for CVE-2014-0160 aka Heartbleed).
Next, we’ve got to grab the tomcat native library source tarball (tomcat-native.tar.gz) from Jira so we can compile from source. If you installed Jira from the .bin installer, Jira should be installed at /opt/atlassian/jira. From there, you’ll find the tomcat-native.tar.gz in the bin/ folder (full path: /opt/atlassian/jira/bin). To keep the bin directory clean, we’ll extract the tarball to the home folder of the logged in user:
tar -xzvf tomcat-native.tar.gz -C ~
Now if you cd into the home directory (cd then ls -la) you’ll find a directory called tomcat-native-1.1.29-src. We’ll need to locate the configure script that is some where in that folder. Thankfully, I’ve already done the research for you and it’s in jni/native. cd to that location.
Now that we’ve got the configure script, we need to run the script with the appropriate configuration locations and files. At minimum, you should provide the APR location (--with-apr) and the JVM location (--with-java-home). If you installed APR with apt, the APR config binary will be in /usr/bin/apr-1-config.
Next, the JRE/JDK location. Jira comes with a bundled JRE, but it’s not sufficient for the Tomcat Native Library configurator. If you use the Jira JRE path of /opt/atlassian/jira/jre you’ll get the error checking os_type directory... Cannot find jni_md.h in /opt/atlassian/jira/jre when you run the configuration script. To rectify this, you’ll need the OpenJDK JRE for Linux. Once again, using apt we can install it with ease: apt-get install openjdk-7-jre. After that has completed, if you do find / -name "jni_md.h" you should get something like this:
/usr/lib/jvm/java-7-openjdk-amd64/include/jni_md.h
/usr/lib/jvm/java-7-openjdk-amd64/include/linux/jni_md.h
You can use either file, as a diff shows that both files are the same. With that in mind, our configuration variable --with-java-home can be set to /usr/lib/jvm/java-7-openjdk-amd64. Finally, with SSL support, you can safely set --with-ssl to yes as the configurator can guess the OpenSSL settings. With all that in mind, our final configure string will be as follows:
./configure --with-apr=/usr/bin/apr-1-config --with-java-home=/usr/lib/jvm/java-7-openjdk-amd64 --with-ssl=yes
Hit return and let the configure script finish. Now you can finish it off by making and installing by doing the following: make && make install. As we did not specify an installation prefix, the compiled library will be installed at /usr/local/apr/lib. Jira expects the library to be in one of these folders: /usr/java/packages/lib/amd64, /usr/lib64, /lib64, /lib or /usr/lib. I’m just going to copy them to /usr/java/packages/lib/amd64, do that like so:
cp /usr/lib/* /usr/java/packages/lib/amd64
Now you’re done. Simply start Jira using your prefered method and you should find that APR is being loaded correctly. You can verify this by doing cat /opt/atlassian/jira/logs/catalina.out | grep -A 1 "AprLifecycleListener" and you should see something like this:
Jun 02, 2014 4:23:11 PM org.apache.catalina.core.AprLifecycleListener init
INFO: Loaded APR based Apache Tomcat Native library 1.1.29 using APR version 1.4.6.
Jun 02, 2014 4:23:11 PM org.apache.catalina.core.AprLifecycleListener init
INFO: APR capabilities: IPv6 [true], sendfile [true], accept filters [false], random [true].
Jun 02, 2014 4:23:11 PM org.apache.catalina.core.AprLifecycleListener initializeSSL
INFO: OpenSSL successfully initialized (OpenSSL 1.0.1e 11 Feb 2013)
Hooray! Jira is running, and it’s loading the Tomcat Native Library with APR successfully!
Updates
- 27/09/2014: updated with newest package name and cp path.