Help in upgrade, no JIRA home directory

[SS]

Our amazon instance of JIRA crashed and all we have is JIRA 4.4.3 database.

Can I upgrade JIRA to 5.1 with just the old database and no JIRA_HOME? If yes how?

[SS · Accepted solution]

EDIT: Answering my own question, forgot to mention that ;)

It is actually a feedback system per se(We were using SOAP protocol in our application to capture it). We didn't collect any attachments so we were good to go.

I did a little bit of experimenting ;) (with help from jira support, they didn't ask me to use the latest 4.4.x)

• I downloaded 4.4.x latest version(4.4.5, I thought of using 5.1 directly but unsure of the after effects so just experimented with 4.4.x releases) of JIRA standalone (linux x64)
• Extracted it
• Created a empty JIRA_HOME
• Edited <JIRA_INSTALL_DIR>/atlassian-jira/WEB-INF/classes/jira-application.properties to point to JIRA_HOME
• Created a file named dbconfig.xml as described here with something like below(be sure to edit it)
  

  • <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
     
    <jira-database-config>
      <name>defaultDS</name>
      <delegator-name>default</delegator-name>
      <database-type>mysql</database-type>
      <jdbc-datasource>
        <url>jdbc:mysql://dbserver:3306/jiradb?useUnicode=true&characterEncoding=UTF8&sessionVariables=storage_engine=InnoDB</url>
        <driver-class>com.mysql.jdbc.Driver</driver-class>
        <username>jiradbuser</username>
        <password>password</password>
        <pool-min-size>20</pool-min-size>
        <pool-max-size>20</pool-max-size>
        <pool-max-wait>30000</pool-max-wait>
        <validation-query>select 1</validation-query>
        <min-evictable-idle-time-millis>60000</min-evictable-idle-time-millis>
        <time-between-eviction-runs-millis>300000</time-between-eviction-runs-millis>
        <pool-max-idle>20</pool-max-idle>
        <pool-remove-abandoned>true</pool-remove-abandoned>
        <pool-remove-abandoned-timeout>300</pool-remove-abandoned-timeout>
        <pool-test-while-idle>true</pool-test-while-idle>
        <validation-query-timeout>3</validation-query-timeout>
      </jdbc-datasource>
    </jira-database-config>

• Once the system started up I got a few warning messages and atlassian doing some upgrade process with the database.
• Now I took a backup of JIRA(XML backup) available in admin console
• I downloaded JIRA 5.1.5 standalone and edited the jira-application.properties to point to a new JIRA_HOME and a empty database
• Got it up and running with the setup wizard
• Restored using my backed up zip file(Referred to as XML backup)
• Now we have a JIRA 5.1 running (Yay!!)

[Andy Brook [Plugin People]]

Well, you're not in a happy place for sure, you have lost all attachments for starters, as well as any all plugins, I dont suppose you have an externally stored backup of JIRA_HOME? Are you sure you cant get at the disk image of the machine? I would hope you can get something out?

Attempting to leap to 5.1 is a bad idea. Setup a local JIRA 4.4.3 installation, once installed, shutdown JIRA, and restore a COPY of your prod database to the local instance. Start JIRA and stand well clear.

Once launched, reindex. I offer no guarantees but you should be able to see something.

Perhaps consider using a hosting company such that they will be responsible/accountable for future backups?

Once you have some kind of running 4.4.3 you could consider upgrading.