Proforma Forms cannot be added to issues with "ProForma does not have an HMAC secret defined. This will cause problems when updating Jira fields from ProForma forms" error in the logs
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Note that this knowledge base article was created for the Data Center version of the product. Data Center knowledge base articles 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.
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The steps outlined on this article are provided AS-IS. This means we've had reports of them working for some customers — under certain circumstances — yet are not officially supported, nor can we guarantee they'll work for your specific scenario.
You may follow through and validate them on your own non-prod environments prior to production or fall back to supported alternatives if they don't work out.
We also invite you to reach out to our Community for matters that fall beyond Atlassian's scope of support!
Summary
Proforma Forms cannot be added to issues with "ProForma does not have an HMAC secret defined. This will cause problems when updating Jira fields from ProForma forms" error in the logs
Environment
This only happens on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and Jira configured with RHEL Java
Diagnosis
The following messages will be evident in atlassian-jira.log:
2023-08-25 09:36:43,317+1000 http-nio-8080-exec-7 url: 2023-08-25 09:42:31,945+1000 http-nio-8080-exec-10 url: /rest/projects/1.0/sidebar/issue/ICTSD-4223; user: user@domain.com WARN 582x9508x1 du6a6z 192.168.16.132,10.83.5.11 /rest/projects/1.0/sidebar/issue/ISSUEKEY-123 [c.t.p.plugin.util.UserServiceImpl] ProForma does not have an HMAC secret defined. This will cause problems when updating Jira fields from ProForma forms.
Cause
Red Hat Java, even though OpenJDK is not officially supported by Atlassian. It has additional security setting security.useSystemPropertiesFile in $JAVA_HOME/conf/security/java.security which inherits the settings from the Operating system by default and which causes this issue
Solution
Official recommendation is to use only Supported versions of JAVA, i.e. either Oracle JRE/JDK or Eclipse Temurin
https://confluence.atlassian.com/adminjiraserver/supported-platforms-938846830.html
As a best effort workaround, if using Red Hat Java is must, in this particular scenario the security.useSystemPropertiesFile property in the java.security file can be modified to:
security.useSystemPropertiesFile=false
Removing that line could work to but be mindful that it could affect other applications on the server, you may need to check with the Operating System vendor for further clarifications