Thursday 12 May 2016

How not to screw up installing the JIRA plugin for Netbeans

OK so you want a fully integrated IDE environment so let's install the JIRA plugin into our Netbeans environment. Easy-peasy Plugins->Available Plugins->JIRA and Install....


OK, JIRA appears to be a special plugin that gets installed in Netbeans' installation directory which you had dutifully installed as root. So I'll run Netbeans with sudo and all will be well, indeed the JIRA plugin will install...

...at that point all hell breaks loose! When you run it again without sudo Netbeans either fails to start of complains about permissions left, right and centre.


  • You've are running Netbeans in your home account as root!
  • Your local ~/.netbeans/8.x configuration will be be owned by root
  • The ~/.cache/netbeans storage will be owned by root
  • Any projects that were open and autocopy their files to another location will have been written as root  
Don't ever run Netbeans with sudo!

All the permissions can be fixed but it is a right PITA if you don't know about them all. Instead run Netbeans from root's home directory as root. Simply:

sudo su -
> netbeans

and then install the JIRA plugin. When you go back to your own account though JIRA might not be listed as an installed plugin it will be listed as Task Repository Connector.


Wednesday 14 October 2015

Installing Maven on Centos 6.4 with Java 1.7

Wanted to build a virtual machine under Vagrant to build Java 1.7 applications that will be deployed on RH/Centos6.4. As root or use sudo:

  1. yum update - my centos6.4 box was out of date and yum couldn't handle https repos, the ca-certificates package needed updating.
  2. yum install epel-release - the EPEL repos will now work as they use https by default
  3. yum install java-1.7.0-openjdk-devel - yeah java!
  4. yum install wget - no it wasn't installed by default
  5. wget http://repos.fedorapeople.org/repos/dchen/apache-maven/epel-apache-maven.repo -O /etc/yum.repos.d/epel-apache-maven.repo - Maven is not available from standard RPM repo sigh
  6. yum install apache-maven - nope! it will fail as it requires java-devel >= 1.7.0 which for some reason java-1.7.0-openjdk-devel fails to provide, even though the 1.5 and 1.6 packages do! sigh
  7. yum install yum-utils - to get repoquery
  8. rpm -Uvh --nodeps `repoquery --location apache-maven` - install maven ignoring dependency