Administrator Access is Incorrectly Redirecting

Platform Notice: Data Center Only - This article only applies to Atlassian products on the Data Center platform.

Note that this KB was created for the Data Center version of the product. Data Center KBs for non-Data-Center-specific features may also work for Server versions of the product, however they have not been tested. Support for Server* products ended on February 15th 2024. If you are running a Server product, you can visit the Atlassian Server end of support announcement to review your migration options.

*Except Fisheye and Crucible

Symptoms

When attempting to access a page that requires Administration Access, or websudo (as in Configuring Secure Administrator Sessions), the page incorrectly redirects to http://secure/admin/WebSudoAuthenticate.jspa, as below:

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Nothing will appear in the atlassian-jira.log as this error is from Tomcat and will not throw an exception.

Cause

The Tomcat server.xml has been configured incorrectly and this is causing the problem to occur, as below:

1 <Context docBase="${catalina.home}/atlassian-jira" path="/" reloadable="false" useHttpOnly="true">

This should be path="" rather than path="/".

Resolution

  1. Backup the Tomcat server.xml file, as found in $JIRA_INSTALL/conf.

  2. Modify the Context path so that it no longer has the forward slash, for example:

    1 <Context docBase="${catalina.home}/atlassian-jira" path="" reloadable="false" useHttpOnly="true">
  3. Restart JIRA.

  4. Test to ensure Administration Sections can now be accessed.

Updated on April 8, 2025

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