Migrating Jira data from lower environment to prod environment

Question

Hi Team,

I have a request from management to Migrate Jira data from the lower environment to production. They have asked me to create a deployment document and checklist for this activity.

Can someone from the Atlassian team help me out by providing the end to end documentation for this activity?

Regards,

Kanaka.

Radek Dostál · Answer

I have a very good experience with it having migrated (I think I'm at hundreds now) of projects between a lot of very different instances.

It can do what it says on the tin - it can export both the project configuration data and it's definition, as well as issue data, all in a single zip file. Then you would be able to do an import preview with this file on your destination instance, and it should allow you to import those configuration data, schemes, etc., and then it will (optionally) import the issue data into this newly imported setup.

You can actually automate these processes to some degree if that would be needed.

I really have to be honest in one thing - if we are talking about a single project export/import (with or without issue data - you can decide which option you need), where you have pretty much the same global configuration of your development and production instances, things should generally be smooth. You would see in the preview that you will just modify a couple of schemes and stuff, generally nothing major.

However if you were to do things with it like migrations between very different systems (or if you really, really, really customized that dev environment a lot), then without putting forethought in it and paying attention to the preview, you could end up changing your global configuration or things like shared schemes between multiple projects, so I would always put a disclaimer for people to be more mindful about what they really are trying to import.

As a closing thought, I would believe that for dev/prod config syncing, it's pretty easy to use as long as you have a decent understanding how Jira is structured to understand the preview page and the proposed changes it will do with the import.

I have heard of a few other plugins that can do this dev/prod syncing, however I don't have much experience with those so I can't really speak of those very much nor do a comparison.

Nani_vevka4 · Answer

Hello Radek,

I agree with your answer and now the requirement is to migrate only a single project as of now.

Can you suggest that for migrating the Jira project to a new instance by using an addon called the project configurator plugin in detail like its pros and corns?

Is it okay to continue with this plugin for the entire configuration like workflows, screens, custom fields, attachments? Any suggestions from your end for this entire activity?

Thanks,

Kanaka

Radek Dostál · Answer

If you are looking to only import some configuration, like e.g. modified schemes, workflows, and so on, then there is no out of box way to do this other than manually.

As you mention dev and prod environments, I will assume you're not on Cloud (and I think it is the same there as well):

Jira out of box provides ability to import a single project, however, this only imports issue data -- it does not import configuration. Therefore, to be able to import issue data, you first need to set up identical configuration on the destination instance so that the data can be imported into it.

Pramodh's answer talks about restoring the entire instance -- this is from what I understand not what you want.

Doing such configuration syncs can be pretty impractical, a timer eater and can factor in human errors.

If this is something you would need to be doing regularly I would recommend reviewing a plugin to help you doing that, such as Project Configurator: https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1211147/project-configurator-for-jira?hosting=datacenter&tab=overview