periodically migrate production jira to test jira

[Dante Delia]

I have two identically set up hosts running JIRA 7.x    One is a test server, which is used only for testing OS patches, JIRA upgrades, plugin updates, etc before doing so on the production server.    I have the same users on both hosts.

I would like to occasionally "refresh" the test server to contain all the projects, etc from the production server to the test server.    Can this be accomplished by simply dumping and migrating the database data from the production database to the test one?   I'm assuming all the configuration, users and groups, credentials and so on are in the database and not on the file system.    Of course I realize there are some configurations on the file system (I have an edited setenv.sh, dbconfig.xml, and system.xml) but other than host names, would everything be the same onthe filesystems?

[Lynsey Nelson]

Yes, you can copy your production database to your test database server. However you will need to ensure that you go in to your test instance after the refresh and update the base URL in JIRA settings to point to your test instance, as well as anything else that still points to the production instance.