Why is project cloning not supported?

[Aidem Media]

Hi! My company has been using JIRA for over a year, but the use has been limited to pretty basic stuff. We're now intending to make better use of your tool, as all in all it is pretty amazing. I am baffled however why such a basic operation as project cloning is not supported and everyone is advised to use 3rd party plugins or CLI commands. Here's the situation me and my company found ourselfes in:

1) What we would need of JIRA to be a valuable for us is an ability to have Project Templates - a templated with desired project settings, along with 20-30 sample issues already created (we have a lot of repetitive tasks in our projects)

2) I was quite surprised, when i realized that creating such a template wasn't actually possible. I've tried quite a lot of options, but nothing seemed to work:

a) Issue importing/exporting: You support various ways of exporting (XML, RSS, Printable, Excel, Word, etc) but for importing you only allow CSV, which cannot be exported to - I mean… where's the logic in that?

b) Explored solutions I came across, when googling the subject - there were a few plugins recommended, none of which were supported by the Cloud version, which was another slap in the face. The only solution supported by the Cloud version was CLI stuff, which I tried to figure out, but failed miserably - it's not really a user friendly solution.

c) Determined to get it to work the way we needed it to my company has switched to a Server version (for plugin support), we migrated the cloud version, everything went ok. Today i started picking a plugin, that would at long last finally offer functionalities I desired. Imagine my surprise, when none of the plugins I tried actually worked the way i needed it to. There were some that claimed to have the functionalities, but wouldn't cut it in the end. Plugins i've tried:

• Clone Plus for JIRA - not sure if i installed it right, it mentioned some dependancy (clone plus JSP), which i tried to install but couldn't (downloaded a package from the dev site, tried the 'Upload add-on", it only worked for the 1.0.0 version, was tossing an error in all other cases (of more recent packages))
• Project Clone Plugin - was supposed to add "Project Clone" button in the project overview screen, but hasn't
• BulkClone - only worked for single issues, couldn't actually do a Bulk clone (only Clone option worked, Clone+ and Clone++ ended up with an error)
• Clone And Move JIRA Plugin - only worked for single issues
• Gaia for JIRA - Project Templates - this one was promising, was creating a project template and allowed attachment of exported XML file with the issues, but it would never recreate them in the end, when creating a new project with the template
• T M Project Templates - couldn't find any options that it might have added
  
  

At this point I'm running out of options… It really is beyond my comprehension why I need to go to such extremes in order to attain such a basic functionality. I mean… how hard would it be for you to add a simple "Clone Project" to Jira? You have a lot of much more complex solutions implemented, but not raw cloning. I've wasted most of my work-day today looking for alternatives and failed in the end, so I'm now reaching out to you for at least an explanation - not really expecting much else at this point...

[Andreas Roth]

Same for us - Plugin was perfect and now with the new Version we hit dirt.

We run quite a lot of Projects most based on a standard "Template Project" with all the customizing and pre defined Tasks. Clone Plugin in combination with the bulk Copy Plugin where super helpful - now we need again expensive trained people for a quick Project Setup

Hoping for a good Solution here

[Mike [Idea Bubble]]

Yes we are in the same boat, using JIRA for 4 years now and love it. Investigating https://bobswift.atlassian.net/wiki/display/JCLI/Getting+Started for project cloning at the moment.

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

Clone Plus for JIRA does have an additional installation step required - see JSP Installation Instructions. This can be used together with the cloneProject action from JIRA Command Line Interface (CLI). This supports a number of automation scenarios related to project and issue cloning.

There is also Project Creator.