Getting Jira to work with subversion 1.5

We recently moved most of our servers. In the move we also upgraded our subversion server to the latest version (1.5.x). All went very well, except that our Jira (Jira is this great Feature and Bug-Tracking tool from Atlassian) could not see the subversion repository anymore.

The error we got was “svn: malformed network …”.

I suspected that, with the move to the latest version of subversion, the connection to subversion within Jira must use .jar files which were only compatible with subversion 1.4. Indeed, that was the case.

So, if you run into this, just download the latest SVNKit from http://svnkit.com (it is the standalone version), extract it and copy the svnkit.jar file to the directory “{jira-root}/atlassian-jira/WEB-INF/lib/”. Make sure that you remove the older svnkit-1.16.jar file or any other svnkit-xxx.jar file. Then restart Jira.