Export content from jira production to jira development server.

Question

The current setup is as follows:

There is a jira stage server running jira 7.x and it got an initial import from a full backup (from jira production that is running an old 6.x jira version as of now).

Now as development evolves on jira development it is important to be able to synchronize all project data (issues / comments / attachments) and users that were newly added to production to the jira development server.

What is the proposed way of handling that?

The plan is to move the jira development instance to production and replace current production server at some point.

Development of new features on the production server is not an option.

Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Answer

Oh, you want to merge, not create a copy of production.

JIRA merges are a different story.  Off the shelf, you will need to transfer the configuration for each project manually (there are add-ons available that can automate a lot of it), and then use "project import" to bring in the issues.

Note that if you don't transfer the production configuration, you can lose stuff on import, but it doesn't have to be identical, unless you are doing testing at that level.

Rudolf Kastl · Answer

Thank you for your answer. That still does not solve my issue i think. If i do a full export of prod now and import it again on the development instance i will loose all settings / adjustments done on the development server. How to mitigate that?

I already had an older snapshot of the prod export imported... now before i send the development server to production to replace the current server... how do I sync the issues without overwriting any of the settings? What about user and group changes? Do you all do that kind of stuff on the production machine?

Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Answer

Most of us take a backup of production and restore it on test.

For a small or medium server, a copy of bits of the home directory (attachments and plugins, the rest you don't need or in some cases, want at all) plus the xml export.  For larger servers, a standard dump of the database restored into the test database, plus the same home directories is the way to do it.