Create JIRA test & staging environment

Question

Hi there,

as we´re going to implement a second JIRA installation to separate between IT development and operative topics we´re looking for a "better" way to create/update our test and staging environments (same for Confluence and longrun Stash & Bamboo).

Currently we´re doing most stuff as documented on Atlassian´s pages, but this are many manual steps and takes some time. One option would be to script such kind of steps or simply buy an addon which already covers such use cases. In a perfect world i simply have to click on any button and soem magic will clone a specific installation to another server, to be chooseable if one or several projects and their issues will be cloned as well. We´re using VMs and start to get some experience with docker, maybe this would also be an option?

I made some investigations in the marketplace, but yet no perfect addon found. Does anybody have some experiences in this topic?

rrudnicki · Answer

Hi Hans-Hermann,

Since you are using VMs, an easy way would be you do this through snapshots. However, you need to pay attention about hostname, IP Address, database connection to don't point to your production when you start new vm. If you follow for this way, I recommend you to create a script to automatise this and make sure you won't have duplicate information (IP, hostname, etc). Also, you can create a VM Template and use this template to create your staging/test environment and after, just update your info (home directory, database, etc).

Another possibility would be you automatise this using Puppet. If you don't know Puppet, have a look into this ticket: https://puppetlabs.com/puppet/what-is-puppet. Using Puppet + Docker you can do amazing things.

Anyway, at the first time you will have some work to do, there isn't a magic button yet (you will need to create this 
).

Regards, 
Renato Rudnicki