Cloning an entire issue hierarchy

Question

We are using Portfolio for Jira to define a project hierarchy (based on SAFe) as

Portfolio Epic  -> Capability -> Epic -> Story -> Sub-task

Many of our projects are defining a hierarchy of issues which they then want to be able to reuse, by cloning the entire hierarchy.  So for example, cloning the Capability and all it's child Epics, Stories and Sub-tasks.  The new issues would need to be linked the relevant cloned parent.

Does anyone know any add-ons that might do this?  I have experimented doing this using Structure but unfortunately it doesn't link the Epic/Story to the newly cloned parent.

Running Jira 8.2.3, Server.

Thanks,

Jeffrey Bistrong · Answer

@Benjamin Peikes I keep running into an issue with my cloning hierarchy in script runner. Have you run into this before

For background I have an onboarding template in jira that we need cloned everytime a new onboarding request is submitted.

It starts with an initiative and then we have epics tasks and subtasks. When I put all of my items into one epic it works as expected, but when i add multiple epics under my initiative i start to get this error about ranking

2026-04-13 22:37:11.303 ERROR - FAILED create for HRTEMPLATE-11. Status: 400 Body: [errorMessages:[], errors:[rankBeforeIssue:expected Object, rankAfterIssue:expected Object]]

Benjamin Peikes · Answer

We use ScriptRunner for templates. We add a label "template" for all of our templates, and then have a transition "Clone Template" that is available from all statuses but does not change the status. It has a post function that calls ScriptRunner. The only thing that is a pain, is that you can't collect variables that can be used to replace strings in the template.

To get around this, we add fields, and what happens is that you fill out the fields, which updates the fields in the template, then the post function uses them during the clone, and then unsets the fields in the template ticket.

Inactive Stephen · Answer

Hi @Pete Singleton

You could look into whether a listener is possible to add via ScriptRunner - so if a Portfolio Epic has a specific component (eg. Template), it activates and creates a set of issues below it.

Looking around I also found this answer here, which talks about creating issues in a similar manner using the app Power Scripts.