Best Way to Upgrade "Old" JIRA and Atlassian Install?

Yiz John

Hi,

We have two hosts, one running JIRA & Confluence, and the other a MySQL database (version 5.1.73-log).  JIRA is version v6.3.15 and Confluence is version 5.7.

I want to upgrade them to the most recent version, and get myself a new support contract, but I think I remember reading that from a certain version upwards, I can no longer use MySQL, is this correct?   That's going to be a problem, as I know absolutely nothing about Oracle.

Is the best thing just to install two new VMs, put new versions of - what database? - on the one, and a new JIRA & Confluence on the other, and then import a database dump, as well as the appropriate config files from the Atlassian suite, as well as the Confluence attachments directory?

Thanks.

Andy Heinzer

That's actually not correct.  Both Jira and Confluence in their current versions still support MySQL, however I believe both do so in newer versions of that database and no longer support 5.1.x version of MySQL.  Even if that was the case, you wouldn't have to run Oracle for your database, you could pick any database type / data version from the supported platforms page:

• Jira 7.13 supported platforms
• Confluence 6.13 supported platforms.

So if you still prefer MySQL you could use a version like 5.6.x for both applications.  The thing to know is that you're going to need to upgrade to an intermediate version of Jira first, and likely the same is true for Confluence as well.   For Jira you need to upgrade to a 7.0.x version first, and be sure to upgrade your plugins on that version also.  This is explained in Skipping major versions when upgrading Jira.

Also when you do the new install of Jira/Confluence, be sure to download the latest 5.1.x version of the MySQL JDBC database driver.  This isn't bundled with our products for licensing reasons, but I have seen a number of users recently trying to use the 8.x version of that driver and it causes some pretty terrible errors.

The main trick here is to make sure that the version you are upgrading to will support your platform (database, java version, etc). You will notice that the supported platforms docs have a version number in the top right corner that corresponds to the version of Jira/Confluence in question.   In your case, I think you're going to need to migrate your data to a newer database in order to complete the upgrade of both applications.  It might be possible for you to do this in one step. Where you take XML backup of your Jira data, and a backup of your $JIRAHOME/data/ directory, and then restore these  (Important: restore the data directory first), in order to both migrate to a new database and upgrade that data.  However I'm not as confident if that method is really suggested for Confluence as much.

 

I'd recommend Upgrading Confluence for more details of that application.  It looks like you can upgrade that one directly to the latest version from that documentation.  I would just check to make sure that your database is supported in the latest version before trying the upgrade itself.

For both of these products, I would recommend that you create new installations and migrate your data, rather than trying to upgrade your instance in place.  It can work the other way, but upgrades to these applications are fraught with complications usually.  So it would be best to test out an upgrade / database migration before you do it on your production data to minimize the downtime to your end users.