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Upgrading from Jira 4.1.1 to latest version 5.2.2

Vishal Chugh

Hi,

I am new to Jira . Our organization has requested us to upgrade current Jira 4.1.1 (standalone ) to latest released version 5.2.2 .

Is it possible to upgrade directly from 4.1.1 to 5.2.2 ? Are there any complicaitons ? Should we be doing incremental upgrades from 4.1.1 till 5.2.2 ?

Can someone please advise?

Thanks,

Vishal Chugh

Accepted answers

All comments

vkharisma

Hi Vishal,

Normally people use the incremental updates to reduce the down time during production instance upgrade. Sometime, a direct update with a big version gap can takes hours to finish. So yeap, using incremental upgrade is a good idea, you can try 4.1.1 - 4.3.4 - 5.2.2 and observe if the upgrade is running smoothly on a staging instance before upgrading your production instance.

Vishal Chugh

Hi Vicky ,

Thank you so much for guidance.

I saw later that latest available Jira version is 5.2.3 .

I am sorry , i tried directly upgrade from 4.1.1 to 5.2.3 .

I tried below :

1) I copied over our Jira 4.4.1 installation directory to new test machine .

2) Took export of DB from old machine and imported to new machine's mySQL DB .

3) On test machine , restarted the Jira instance , Jira URL came up and was able to login with same credentials as with Jira on old machine and was able to see everything . So far so good.

Quesion : Is it right to do (what i did in steps 1 , 2 , 3 above) ?

4) Installed Jira 5.2.3 on this test machine , pointed Jira to this new Jira , ran config.sh , configured DB (as mentioned in https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRA/Connecting+JIRA+to+MySQL#ConnectingJIRAtoMySQL-configurejirawithdatabase ) to point to existing imported DB on this new machine (which i imported in step 2 above )and restarted this new Jira instance .

5) Now when i opened the new Jira URL first time , it opened setup wizard and i was asked for DB details again , i provided same exisitng DB details (as was in step 4 ) but it says "that it needs an empty DB" to continue with ? Then i created another empty DB in MySQL and provided those details in setup wizard and the i was able to proceed further .

Question :

a) Is this normal ? Is it like , to place upgraded DB data , we need empty DB while upgrade ?

b) Has it taken care to understand my existing DB (which i provided in step 4 ) and upgrade it and place the upgraded tables in new DB which i created through setup wizard ( i doubt this ) .

6) And then it shows message "Already exisiting Jira" , specify backed up data file location .

Question : Which data file it is expecting ? I already have my data in exisitng DB .What is required from here ?

Vishal Chugh

Continuation :

Still , to continue with (assuming it is not able to pick data from existing DB and expecting backup from some other file ) , I provided , 2012-Dec-25--0849.zip location to it and continued.

7) I was able to open new Jira URL and could see new features and GUI .

8) We used to have GreenHopper plugin , but now i dont see it . Does plugin require special treatment ? Wont the plugins be part of upgrade process ?

9) I downloaded and installed "Trial version " of GreenHopper plugin .

After this test upgrade looks fine , we will do same for final upgrade .

Am i following the right approach ?

Can you pls advise.

Thanks in advance ,

Vishal Chugh

Naren3

Hi Vishal,

Quesion : Is it right to do (what i did in steps 1 , 2 , 3 above) ?

Though you imported the DB export to a new machine and configured the JIRA with the new DB, did you took a backup of JIRA_HOME directory and pointed it to the new upgraded JIRA 5.2.3 as <NEW_JIRA_HOME>during this process. If not, though you'll be able to see the issues, etc but stilll you'll miss out on attachments, etc of older JIRA 4.4.1.

Can you let us know did you replaced the JIRA 5.2.3 <INSTALL_DIR> with the older JIRA 4.4.1 <INSTALL_DIR>, as you don't need to overwrite the complete installation diorectory and just change necessary files in JIRA 5.2.3 w.r.t JIRA 4.4.1 installation files.

8) We used to have GreenHopper plugin , but now i dont see it . Does plugin require special treatment ? Wont the plugins be part of upgrade process

The Greenhopper plugin isn't the part of the upgrade process, you may find the documentation for Greenhopper upgrade here, also you can check the upgrade notes too. You can apply the license key for the Greenhopper plugin and after configuring the Greenhopper pluginyou should perform JIRA re-index as Re-indexing is must.

Please make the follow the pointerswhile upgrading the JIRA to latest -

Go thoroughly through the release notes and upgrade guide
Back up your database
Back up your JIRA Home directory, Attachment directory and Installation directory
Check all the additional user-installed plugins in older JIRA and check its compatibility w.r.t to latest JIRA.
Track the changes made to JIRA configuration files, such as - jira-application.properties, osuser.xml, seraph-config.xml, setenv.sh or setenv.bat, etc. and backup those files
Install the new version of JIRA
Migrate your existing JIRA configurations over to your new JIRA installation
Point your new JIRA to your existing JIRA Home directory
Make the necessary changes in the configuration files, such as - jira-application.properties, osuser.xml, seraph-config.xml, setenv.sh or setenv.bat, etc of newer JIRA w.r.t the configuration files of older JIRA
[Optional] Delete the .bundled-plugins and .osgi-plugins directory before restarting the newer JIRA
Install the addiotnal plugins which are comaptible w.r.t the newer version of JIRA
Connect your new JIRA to your existing database
Start your new version of JIRA. [Always keep an eye at the logs for the errors (if any) generated during JIRA startup]
* Reindex the JIRA after restarting it.

Hope you find it useful!

Vishal Chugh

Hi Naren,

Now i understand the whole mess is might be , because , in our 4.1.1 installation , we were using the jira.home same as the jira installation directory ( and i dont see anywhere JIRA_HOME env variabale defined anywhere :-( ) . We cant define jira.home same as jira installation directory which i realized when i got error smth like : https://confluence.atlassian.com/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=302810385 .

After i copied Jira 4.1.1 installation directory and backup .zip files from old server to new test server and imported the DB dump , Jira 4.1.1 URL came up fine.

Then i installed 5.2.3 in seperate location on same new test machine and modified the jira.home ( to refer to locaiton of 5.2.3 now ) in jira-application.properties file in 5.2.3 installation files and then ran config.sh to setup DB details ( to make it refer to same exisiting 4.1.1 imported DB ) and then started the JIRA .

First problem , was i got "setup wizard" , it asked me for specifying an empty DB ( then i had to create an empty DB jiradb523 for it ) and then i was able to press next , then it asked for "data file location" , then i specified , copied one 4.1.1 back-up .zip file to proceed ahead and then i ran into error https://confluence.atlassian.com/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=302810385 and then i had to modify jira.home to refer to some other location .

Sorry , this is so much confusing .

Can you please explain :

While doing upgrade , if JIRA_HOME refer to some other location than INSTALLATION_DIR of 5.2.3 then how come it will know that it is suppoed to pick up new files of 5.2.3 ? I mean do , we have some varibale like JIRA_INSTALL_DIR to point it to new Jira 5.2.3 ?

Thanks,

Vishal Chugh

Hi Naren,

We dint want to do upgrade directly on production instanace of jira 4.1.1 . So idea was to repllicate the whole exisiting jira 4.1.1 setup to test machine and make sure everything is fine and the proceed for the upgrade procedure to latest jira 5.2.3 .

So we can say , we were kind of migrating ( 4.1.1 to new server ) + upgrading ( to 5.2.3 on this new server ) .

P.S : In our jira 4.1.1 , we are having jira.home refering to Jira installation directory .

When you say "Point your new JIRA to your existing JIRA Home directory " , what do you mean by this ? Do you mean to modify jira.home (in jira-application.properties file of 5.2.3 installation ) to make it refer to same location as of jira.home (in jira-application.properties file of 4.1.1 installation )

Thanks,

Vishal Chugh

I have came across https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRA/upgrade_Point+JIRA+to+JIRA+Home :

If your new JIRA Latest installation is on a new server, copy the backup of your existing JIRA Home Directory from the old server to the new server before proceeding.

To set up a "recommended" (not WAR) distribution:

Open the JIRA Configuration Tool.

Click the JIRA Home tab.

Update the JIRA Home Directory field:
If your JIRA Latest installation is on a new server, update the JIRA Home Directory field to the path of your copied JIRA Home directory.

If your JIRA Latest installation is on the same server, update the JIRA Home Directory field to the path of your existing JIRA Home directory.
For more information about this directory, see JIRA Home Directory.

Vishal Chugh

Sorry forgot to update , our upgarde went successful in Feb-13 and all are happy with that . Thank you so much again..