Deleting Jira projects, the simple way

[#1]

Have you ever deleted a Jira Cloud project? On the face of it, it shouldn’t be a big deal. You click on delete and it’s gone, right?

Well, if you’ve been a Jira administrator for a while, you’ve most likely worked with all sorts of Jira schemes, such as workflows, issue types, screens, issue type screens, and many more. Do you know what Jira does to these schemes once you’ve deleted your project? The answer is simple: Nothing - they will still exist as orphaned configuration items.

@Bhaargavi Natarajan from Atlassian stumbled across the same situation and came up with a handy 12 step guide how you can not only delete a project, but also the related configuration items. It’s really helpful but still a manual and painful process.

The simple way

While performing some Cloud Migration tests, deleting a project as described above was too cumbersome for me. That’s why we took part in the Codegeist hackathon and came up with an easy way - the Project Gardener. It mainly offers two features:

• List all the configuration items for a project.
• Delete (all) the configuration items for a project in one go.

Now, I can finally delete delete projects and all associated schemes with a single click.

Try It Yourself

The Project Gardener is available for free on the Atlassian Marketplace. So why don’t you save yourself some time and delete projects the simple way?

[Matthias Gaiser _K15t_]

Special shoutouts go to:

• @Sai Tharun Lakkoju (K15t) for the implementation
• @Anshuman Dash _K15t_ for coordination of the project
• @Umer Sohail _K15t_ for spreading the word.

[Matthias Gaiser _K15t_]

Feedback Welcome

Although this is a free non-supported app, we'd appreciate your feedback how the app works for you or helps you in your migrations or other tasks.

[Dave Mathijs]

Hi @Matthias Gaiser _K15t_ I just installed the app on my personal site for testing and review.

When you delete a project via the app, it is deleted immediately and cannot be recovered from the trash, correct?

[Matthias Gaiser _K15t_]

This is correct, @Dave Mathijs. It needs to be done this way, so that all the schemes can be deleted,  otherwise you'd get some warning that the scheme is still in use by the trashed project.

That's also one reason why the UI is only accessible from the admin section to not make this action too accessible for accidental deletion of a project.

[Steven Rhodes]

@Matthias Gaiser _K15t_  Doesnt seem to load all the projects? We have over 500 and nothing past the letter A or B is loaded or can be found. Current workaround is to change the project name / key and prefix a letter A to it. Except for that, it does what it says it should do. I approve of the not being able to delete a project if there are more than 100 issues in it. This is an added failsafe.

[Matthias Gaiser _K15t_]

Thank you for the feedback, @Steven Rhodes. We'll perform some tests with 500+ projects and see what we can do.