Jira Migration, with different usernames

Question

Hello everyone, We are in the midst of migrating roughly 15 Jira projects from one domain to another, varying board complexities from pretty vanilla use to very heavily used boards with links, mentions etc out the wazoo. That 15 will likely grow to 45 by the time we are done with all of our migrations.

We are using the Project Configurator and Jira version 8.2.3

I now realize that username is the attribute. Unfortunately usernames are very different between the domains. They are coming from jsmith and migrating over to our environment which defines their username as their employee ID.

I have come across a couple of potential "solutions" (mucking around in the DB, changing usernames in AD), but I want to reach out here to see if anyone has done this before.

My question is: Has anyone done cross domain migration with different usernames before, if so, was it successful in preserving user data (tickets assigned, mentions etc), and of course, how did you do it?

Really appreciate any help and guidance here.

Nate

Ismael Jimoh · Answer

Hi Nathan.Dreier@parsons.com

Unfortunately I have not done this before. Also, you would need an editor that is quite large for doing what you mentioned above.

I would normally do the following in a scenario like yours:

* setup a staging server
* restore the backup there
* Perform the rename on the staging server.
* Migrate the data with the fixed username.

The original data stays the same and they can access with the same credentials but this does not impact the new server or data we migrate.

Cheers.

Nathan.Dreier@parsons.com · Answer

So let's say that changing names on the old domain is not feasible (several projects, migrating only a handful at a time), we are not migrating all of the services at once so if we change usernames on the old domain that can really cause issues with other services they will still use.

It has been suggested to whip up a script using sed or another method to basically find and replace userX with userY  and just iterate through all the xml's and other files that are exported.

Have you done anything like that?

Ismael Jimoh · Answer

Hi Nathan.Dreier@parsons.com

I have a bit of experience with this. What I did was build a file listing the username and the new username and then updating this using REST API(only works for users in the internal directory).

For you to progress, you will need to rename users in the source JIRA instance to the same username on the destination JIRA instance.

p.s. A direct database update is not something I will recommend. You will need to know the exact place to update the username in. If you are planning to rename the users via LDAP, then make sure you do not create a new entry but rather do the following:

* Have a new entry added to the existing AD.
* Edit the current AD settings in JIRA and under users, replace the current entry it checks for username to the new one.

This ensures that it does not create a new user and simply renames the user. (In the DB, JIRA maps users by Username and directory ID).

Cheers.