Making changes to and redeploying a plugin

Now that we have deployed the test plugin, it is time to add some proper logic, redeploy the plugin, and test it. Making the changes and redeploying a plugin is pretty easy. In this recipe, we will quickly look at how to do this.

How to do it…

You can make changes to the plugin and redeploy it while the JIRA application is still running. Following is how we do it:

1. Keep the JIRA application running in the window where we executed atlas-run.

2. Open a new command window and go to the root plugin folder where your pom.xml file resides.

3. Run atlas-cli.

4. Wait for the Waiting for commands message to appear.

5. Run the pi. pi stands for plugin install and this will compile your changes, package the plugin JAR, and install it into the installed-plugins folder.

   Note

   As of JIRA 4.4, all the modules are reloadable and hence can be redeployed using this technique.

There's more…

It is also possible to run the plugin in debug mode and point your IDE's remote debugger to it.

Debugging in Eclipse

Following are the steps to debug your plugin in Eclipse:

1. Use atlas-debug instead of atlas-run.

2. Once the virtual JIRA is up and running with your plugin deployed in it, go to Run | Debug Configurations in Eclipse.

3. Create a new remote Java application.

4. Give your application a name, keep the defaults, and give the port number as 5005. This is the default debug port on which the virtual JIRA runs. That's it! Happy debugging!

See also

• The Setting up the development environment recipe

• The Creating a skeleton plugin recipe

• The Using FastDev for plugin development recipe