Upgrading Test Environment before Upgrading Production Environment

[acast2]

I have a situation where I'm wanting to upgrade our Jira Software in test to make sure all goes well before doing this in production, but the problem is that my previous supervisor left the company and he's the one that managed the upgrades. He upgraded test to 7.8 but never got the chance to upgrade production.

I want to make my test environment match production, so that the experience is the same going from 7.6 to latest version.

I've read a lot of the documentation for the upgrade process, but I need clarification on best approach to take in my scenario.

Questions I have so far:

1. I see that the Jira installer created a backup of previous version, so can I simply run the installer again and have the option to rollback?

2. If not, I know I can install Jira from scratch and then copy over the installation and home directories from our production along with a backup of the database but the only difference is that the existing test environment SQL server is not the same SQL server that I'll be using for this upgrade. The existing one cannot be upgraded at this time due to other upgrades scheduled in the future, so I created a new SQL server in test environment just for Jira so that it's compatible with Jira.

I believe restoring database to it would still work after copying production home & installation folders over to test Jira server with proper edit changes made to custom files pointing it to the new SQL server I built?

This will get me started for now, any help is greatly appreciated...thanks.

[acast2 · Accepted solution]

An update, Question 1 is a no go. Running the installer does not give you the option to rollback to a previous version.

However, upon further reading replicating your test environment is doable even if you install from scratch, so in my scenario I believe this will be the best approach.

Unless I hear otherwise, I'll move forward with this as my solution...thanks.