How do I import a list of projects?

[Bridget Maloney]

I'm putting together a proof of concept using my development instance of JIRA on my personal machine. I'm attempting to recreate the project structure of our production environment, and have a list of 30-40 projects. Unfortunately this is extremely time-consuming, as I have to create each project manually, then click several more times to assign the project a category. If the solution I will propose to my supervisors is accepted, I will have to do this again several times in the upcoming future.

Is there no way to import a list of projects, with all details specified, in a CSV file?

I've read the JIRA 5.0 support documentation stating that you can import a single project from a project backup, but no dice there. Our production sever is v4.3; a version whose project backup outputs are incompatible with JIRA 5.1 (the version on my development instance).

Is there any way to speed this process up? I'm spending more time loading mock data, than actually performing the necessary required evaluation procedures.

Thanks!

[Bob Swift [Bob Swift Atlassian Add-ons]]

JIRA Command Line Interface could help with some of this. For instance exportData.