How to upgrade Jira from 7.5.0 to the latest 7.12

[Kha Hoang]

I had never done any Jira upgrade before and I am super nervous now to upgrade it because I have quite a bit of setting in Jira and afraid that I will lose them or have to redo them manually after upgrade.  How difficult is it? Is there any good document out there that I can confidently to follow?  For my case,  I have the following:

1. SAML Authentication, SSL Certs for Authentication, Mail, etc.
2. Apache + Proxy setup to redirect https with no port
3. Quite a bit of Add-on plugins (Structure, Portfolio, ScriptRunner, etc.)
4. BitBucket & Jira Integration (again with all the SSL Certs and other Certs sync up)
5. System Dashboard custom HTML page
6. Custom Logo
7. etc.

Will I have to redo all those above? what do I need to do to be able to maintain them the same with minimum work to do after the upgrade? 

Thank you so much

[Keri]

Hi Kha,

We’ve got an amazing guide here: Best practices guide for upgrading Jira Software server which will address most of your worries.

To set your mind at ease I’d definitely recommend testing your upgrade in a test environment first - this will help you to become familiar with the process and files involved in the upgrade.

The first thing to know really is there are three main parts of Jira:

1. The database - which holds all of the information, such as add-on data, application link data, issue data, paths to icons etc. During the upgrade, this data will be upgraded by upgrade tasks so it’s highly advisable to take a back up of this.
2. The Jira installation directory - this will be upgraded when you run the installer.  It will also hold any custom files, such as modifications to the server.xml
3. The Jira Home folder - this contains information about where your database connection is, along with icons, attachments and backups.

When you run the installer, it will do most of the work for you - any specific custom files may need to be replaced and after Jira is up and running, you’ll want to update your plugins through the manage add-on page.

You’ll also want to check that all of the modifications are still there in the server.xml file.  You’ll find this under Jira installation directory/conf/server.xml - this should have your SSL settings including the path to your keystore etc.

As mentioned before I highly recommend backing up Jira and testing the upgrade before updating production to help give you confidence in the procedure.  You’ll also be able to test out the functionality before releasing to all of your users.

I hope this helps you! It’s always a good idea to have your networking team and database analyst on standby incase you need to make any changes during the upgrade too!

Good luck with the upgrade!

Cheers,

Keri