Release Notes page is Blank in Project Summary

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 clicking on Release Notes in the Project Summary, JIRA should display a list of issues solved by the Release. Instead, the area where this should appear is blank.

The following appears in the atlassian-jira.log:

2013-05-02 15:59:51,104 http-bio-443-exec-1 ERROR xxxxxx 959x66x1 1s9q0wn 172.16.101.39 /secure/ReleaseNote.jspa [jira.project.util.ReleaseNoteManager] Exception occurred while attempting to get velocity body for release note template.
org.apache.velocity.exception.VelocityException: Could not find template 'templates/jira/project/releasenotes/releasenotes-with-releasecomment-text.vm' ensure it is in the classpath.
	at com.atlassian.velocity.DefaultVelocityManager.getEncodedBody(DefaultVelocityManager.java:76)
	at com.atlassian.jira.template.velocity.DefaultVelocityTemplatingEngine$DefaultRenderRequest.asHtml(DefaultVelocityTemplatingEngine.java:104)
	at com.atlassian.jira.project.util.ReleaseNoteManager.getReleaseNote(ReleaseNoteManager.java:151)
	at com.atlassian.jira.web.action.browser.ReleaseNote.getReleaseNote(ReleaseNote.java:97)
...

Cause

This happens because JIRA is trying to find a custom release notes template, but the template is not in the template's folder, which may happen if the template was deleted or was not migrated after an upgrade. The most usual error points to releasenotes-with-releasecomment-text.vm due to 'Creating a Custom Release Notes Template Containing Release Comments'.