Large project migration plan, suggestions?

Michael McNeil August 16, 2012

Current Mantis Setup

One of our projects has its issues stored in Mantis. Our Mantis instance runs on an externally hosted web site with PHP and MySQL. It is not on a machine where we can install JIRA or other tools. The Mantis instance has:

  • over 3000 issues
  • around 25000 comments and notations
  • 10+ years of history
  • about 2000 file attachments


Many of our source control commit messages mention these Mantis items by number.

Desired JIRA Setup

We use JIRA OnDemand for various other projects here, and want to move this large project from Mantis to JIRA. We use the JIRA OnDemand hosted service, which doesn’t allow installing arbitrary software/plugins, such as the JIRA Mantis import tool.

Because of the numerous mentions in our source history and other places, we would like very much to preserving the old mantis issue numbers as JIRA item numbers.

Migration Plan

Here is what we have in mind to perform the migration.

  1. Set up a temporary server
  2. Install MySQL, PHP, Mantis, and a copy of our Mantis instance’s database and attachments.
  3. Download and install latest JIRA trial.
  4. Download and install (if it is not already present?) the Mantis import tool for JIRA.
  5. Use the JIRA import tool to import the Mantis data
  6. Use the JIRA JSON export tool to export a JSON dump of the data
  7. Upload that JSON file to our OnDemand instance, and import it


Open Questions

What about attachment? Will this process bring along the attachments? Or do we need to handle those some other way?

This is a relatively complex series of steps, so we would appreciate feedback on our current plan that is based on what we find documented in JIRA online discussions, wiki pages, etc. It still seems to us there are a lot of steps that could introduce problems or cause the loss of data. If there is a more efficient and direct route for this process we would like to consider it.

1 answer

0 votes
Bob Swift OSS (Bob Swift Atlassian Apps)
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August 17, 2012

Not familar with this environment, but JIRA Command Line Interface might be able to help you fill in some holes in whatever migration path you take.

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