Installing and upgrading JIRA Software, what is the difference between 64bit bin and tar.gz?

[rfreiberger]

I'm new to JIRA and while upgrading our instance in a test environment, support suggested to use the standalone version over using the bin version. Why and when should I use bin over the tar.gz? 

Thanks,

Robert

[Taranjeet Singh · Accepted solution]

@rfreiberger The Linux .bin installer is used to handle the automatic installation process for a JIRA application by itself. You should use this when your JIRA instance does not have a lot of customizations in JIRA installation directory. These customizations need to be manually carried over to the upgraded version anyways.

The tar.gz installation package is used to manually upgrade JIRA, where you need to just download and unarchive the contents of this package into a new location for JIRA installation directory. You should use it if your JIRA instance have a lot of customizations in JIRA installation directory. Also, the customizations from the old installation directory need to be carried over to the new installation directory.

[rfreiberger]

Thank you Taranjeet, can you expand a bit more on the customizations that the bin installer doesn't handle? Does this mean if I use the tar.gz installation package, I can drop and start JIRA from the directory? Thanks!