I am planning on starting up some software development work with a small team. One of the main things that small teams seem to forget is that they still need to stay organized. One of the ways we stay organized in the team we have at work is with Atlassian’s set of software development tools. All of them integrate nicely together and include a wiki (Confluence), git repository server (Stash / Bitbucket) and an excellent issue tracker (JIRA).

We are planning on using Bitbucket for our development because it will be closed-source and perfectly designed for small teams to be free (up to 5 users) with unlimited private repositories and completely fully-featured. JIRA just made sense for keeping track of issues alongside Bitbucket as they integrate together very well. The versatility of JIRA when compared to the other open-source offerings on the market is just unmatched. The closest I found was BugGenie – it included a wiki, which JIRA doesn’t by default as Confluence is a separate product that integrates. It was close, but just not quite what I was looking for, even though it was really easy to install by comparison as we will soon find out.

Atlassian moved recently to per-user licensing rather than feature licensing. This means that the version of the software that you get as a small user-base is the same as the enterprise customers with all of the features. This is a very nice perk for those of us with small teams or trying to start up a small software / web company with minimal cost and not sacrifice organization. Atlassian offers hosted versions of each of their software packages for as little as $10/mo per package for up to 10 users. For most enterprise users, the host-it-yourself version is more useful as they’re usually behind firewalls, etc. What is really nice about the host-it-yourself version, though is that they basically give it away to small start-ups and other organizations of up to 10 users. Their starter license is $10/yr for that number of users including support, etc. This $10 is donated to the Room to Read charity 100%, with Atlassian absorbing the payment processing charges (for more information: https://www.atlassian.com/licensing/starter#aboutthestarterprogram-1).

I have the Synology DS1812+, which is an 8-bay Intel Atom-based NAS. The Synology NAS systems run on a Linux-based operating system called DSM. It is quite user-friendly for the casual and even most power users through the web-only interface. However, since it’s a linux-based system, enabling the command-line-interface opens up a whole new realm of possibilities. Unfortunately, many of the things you might be used to in other distros are either stripped out or in different locations. Remember, DSM is a not an open-source OS. So, though there is usually a way around most of the things, there are some limitations.

My first attempt to install JIRA was unsuccessful until research found the root cause: “Java 7 for Intel Atom CPU does not currently work on Synology, so Intel users are limited to Java 6.” (PCLoadLetter). Guess what CPU the DS1812+ has? Yup, the Intel Atom D2700. I chose this because it was more powerful than the ARM-based systems just in case the media needed to be transcoded (granted, it’s still limited on that aspect as well because it’s a NAS). However, this does seem to be causing a slight problem. The newest versions of JIRA (6.0+) only support Java 7, so I after the ~5 hours of messing with this, I am relegated to trying with 5.2.11, which was the latest and last update to JIRA in the 5.x series supporting Java 6 (https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRA052/Supported+Platforms).

After another few hours, I figured out all of the quirks and got it all up and running. I will post the full how-to later.