Does deleting the project release the project key

[Jari Romo]

We are taking could based JIRA in use at our company. Some of the earlier admins (already left) have been trying out things and create a projects with real project names and therefore crating also Project Keys with real content. Now this was found and brought to my attention. He was using real project name and Key and therefore we have a problem. He also tried out different project types with real names and project keys.

Now my problem is that I have one project having wrong project type. All our projects are Software - Company Managed but this problematic one is Software - Team-managed. We should now get actual project created and planned with correct project key.

I wanted to change Project Key, cannot do for some reason. Change the project type, cannot do as was explained to be difficult.

So my question is can I just delete project which is created wrongly and save the project key by that way. If we need to change the project key it would have major impact to company naming rules.

[Max Foerster - K15t]

Hey @Jari Romo and welcome to the community.

Deleting the project will free up the key. That's correct. :) 

Best, Max

[Jari Romo]

Thank you I'll try.

The drafted project is not used and therefore we do not have any problem to delete it

Jari

[Mayur Jadhav]

Hi @Jari Romo ,

Welcome to the Atlassian Community!!

If you delete the project permanently from the Jira cloud it will release the key and you can use it for future project creation.

Note: If you delete project permanently, it means it will be deleted completely,

Regards,
Mayur 

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

No, you won't be able to create a new project with a used key.

Jira keeps a record of keys in order to preserve the issue histories.

[Connor]

Is Atlassian's documentation incorrect then? From that page:

You won't be able to create a new project with the old project key. The old project key will only be available if you delete the project it was previously associated with.

Answers to this community question indicate Atlassian's documentation is correct, and the project key can be reused if the project is deleted.

[Piotr Janik]

@ConnorThis ticket is about Jira Server & Data Center, not Jira Cloud.

I've just checked it on a test environment, and it seems to be even more complicated: you can reuse the project key, but if you've ever moved a ticket to another project, Jira won't let you reuse this ticket's ID. So if you have a project TEST with tickets up to TEST-10, then move them all to another project, then delete and recreate the project, the first ticket in the recreated project will be TEST-11, not TEST-1. For the latter to happen you'd need to delete those moved tickets as well.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Yes, that's correct, I'm afraid the previous "correct" answers are wrong for server (and the docs referenced are for Cloud).

With Server, you have to delete the project, then all the issues that have been moved out of it, and then go into the database and delete the lines from the project table.