Upgrade from JIRA 5.0 RC2 to final?

[Borek Bernard]

When JIRA 5.0 comes out (hopefully any "minute" now) how to perform an upgrade from 5.0 RC2? I guess there is no supported upgrade path from betas and release candidates but hopefully something simple like uninstalling / reinstalling JIRA works? I'm new to JIRA so am not sure how upgrades from RCs work.

[lmiranda_atlassian · Accepted solution]

I just had a look at the code and there are no database changes between 5.0 RC2 and 5.0, so you should have no problems with the upgrade. Just follow the instructions in http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRA/Upgrading+JIRA.

JIRA 5.0 was released a few hours ago, so why not download it and find out?

[Borek Bernard]

Great, thanks, will try in a few day's time.

[Borek Bernard]

Worked flawlessly

[MattS]

I'd do this via an XML backup not an SQL dump I think. It's a reasonable gamble.

[Andy Brook [Plugin People]]

There is no upgrade path. RC's are not production ready, it's made quite clear that they are to be used at your own risk. It might work, you may be lucky. RC3 is current...

http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRA/EAP+Releases

• EAP Releases are Not Safe— EAP releases are snapshots of the ongoing JIRA development process. As such:
  • While we try to keep these releases stable, they have not undergone the same degree of testing as a full release.
  • Features in development releases may be incomplete, or may change or be removed before the next full release.
• No Upgrade Path — Because EAP releases represent work in progress, we can not provide a supported upgrade path between EAP releases, or from any EAP to the eventual final release. Thus, any data you store in a JIRA EAP release may not be able to be migrated to a future JIRA release.

[Borek Bernard]

Like that no one ever upgraded from one RC to another or from RC to final release? I know it's not *supported* but I will need to attempt it so I'd like to know what to try.

[JamieA]

Not sure if doing this for production data is that common. But just give it a whirl and post back if it doesn't work...

[Borek Bernard]

We started evaluating JIRA in January and 5.0 had the features that we wanted (mainly better usability). RC2 for most of the other software means "it's pretty much done, only critical bugfixes will happen between now and the final release" so it felt like a good choice. The evaluation went well and now I'm thinking what to do - throw everything away because upgrade from RC2 to Final is "impossible"? Well it's the worst case I was aware of when I've chosen unsupported RC but I hope we will be able to keep our data, although we don't have much of it yet.

[Borek Bernard]

So would you suggest creating a SQL dump file, uninstalling everything, install clean JIRA 5.0, try importing the dump file and see if that worked?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Sometimes, it works, sometimes it doesn't. In the past, I've had the dubious job of getting datasets that were created under RC versions into stable ones, and it's varied between a flat import which sailed through, and me having to tell a client that their only "inexpensive" option is to lose most of their data.

I would continue to assume that it's simply not going to work. At least plan for that (you've still got the basic options, like dropping issue data out to CSV and importing it, workflows are still exportable, and you can do quite a lot of "use SQL to build jelly" type stuff, or even think about using raw SQL to rebuild, although that can get very painful very quickly).

[JamieA]

I would not even worry about this until you've tried it and it doesn't work. At worst you will have to do some XML-massaging. It can't be that hard... As you say, RC2 is close enough to final for this to be unlikely to be a major problem.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Pretty much agree with Jamie, although it's unsupported, like him, I actually doubt you'll have a problem. I wouldn't expect much in the way of database changes between a release candidate and a release. It has happened to me, on a v3, but some very quick hacky sql to clean up data in the database fixed it fine.

What I'd plan to do is

1. Backup the database
2. Try running the upgrade as per docs (which boils down to "point v5 at your old Jira database and it'll do the upgrade automatically")
3. If that doesn't work, then read the logs to find out why
4. If there's a lot of errors, then try an xml export / import. Again, check logs if there's any issues.
5. Go with whichever method seems easier to fix any problems for.

If you get a clean import, I'd then run the integrity checker before letting your users in it, and take another backup so you've got a "we got here" point in time backup.

[Borek Bernard]

Thanks to all of you guys, hope it'll go smooth :)