Configuring OpenSearch for Jira ¶

Jira and Helm chart version

OpenSearch is supported in Jira 11.2 and Helm chart 2.0.10 onwards.

As Jira instances grow in size and scale, the default search engine, Lucene, may be slower to index and return search results. To address this, Jira Data Center offers an alternative search engine as an opt-in feature — OpenSearch.

Deploy OpenSearch Helm Chart with Jira ¶

Support disclaimer

Atlassian does not officially support OpenSearch Helm chart that can be installed with the Jira Helm release. Should you encounter any issues with the deployment, maintenance and upgrades, reach out to the vendor. Moreover, if you intend to deploy OpenSearch to a critical Kubernetes environment, make sure you follow all the best practices, i.e. deploy a multi node cluster, use taints and tolerations, affinity rules, sufficient resources requests, have DR and backup strategies etc.

Deploy with the default settings ¶

To deploy OpenSearch Helm chart and automatically configure Jira to use it as a search platform, set the following in your Helm values file:

opensearch:
  enabled: true

This will:

auto-generate the initial OpenSearch admin password and create a Kubernetes secret with OPENSEARCH_INITIAL_ADMIN_PASSWORD key
deploy OpenSearch Helm chart to the target namespace with the default settings: single node, 1Gi memory/1 vCPU resources requests, 10Gi storage request
configure Jira to use the deployed OpenSearch cluster by setting opensearch properties, which are written to jira-config.properties at startup. The following properties are configured: search.platform=opensearch, opensearch.http.url=http://opensearch-cluster-master:9200, opensearch.username=admin, and opensearch.password.

Override OpenSearch Helm chart values ¶

You can configure your OpenSearch cluster and the deployment options by overriding any values that the Helm chart exposes. OpenSearch values must be nested under opensearch stanza in your Helm values file, for example:

opensearch:
  singleNode: false
  replicas: 5
  config:
    opensearch.yml: |
      cluster.name: opensearch-cluster

Use an existing OpenSearch secret ¶

If you have a pre-created Kubernetes secret with the OpenSearch admin password, you can reference it instead of having the chart auto-generate one:

opensearch:
  enabled: true
  credentials:
    createSecret: false
    existingSecretRef:
      name: my-opensearch-secret

The secret must contain a key named OPENSEARCH_INITIAL_ADMIN_PASSWORD.

Connect to an external OpenSearch instance ¶

If you already have an OpenSearch cluster running outside of Kubernetes (or managed separately), you can configure Jira to use it without deploying the bundled OpenSearch Helm chart. OpenSearch properties are written to jira-config.properties at container startup via the additionalConfigProperties mechanism (see Additional config properties).

First, create a Kubernetes Secret containing the OpenSearch password:

kubectl create secret generic opensearch-credentials \
  --from-literal=password='<your-opensearch-password>'

Then reference it in your Helm values file. The additionalEnvironmentVariables entry injects the secret as an environment variable, and additionalConfigPropertiesExpandEnv expands it into the property value at startup:

jira:
  additionalEnvironmentVariables:
    - name: MY_OPENSEARCH_PASSWORD
      valueFrom:
        secretKeyRef:
          name: opensearch-credentials
          key: password

  additionalConfigProperties:
    - "search.platform=opensearch"
    - "opensearch.http.url=http://opensearch-host:9200"
    - "opensearch.username=admin"

  additionalConfigPropertiesExpandEnv:
    - "opensearch.password={MY_OPENSEARCH_PASSWORD}"

For the full list of available OpenSearch properties, see Configuring OpenSearch for Jira.