Need to merge two Confluence/Jira pairs without losing linking. How do I do this?

[Anna McDonald]

I have two instances of Jira and two instances of Confluence. Each Confluence instance is integrated with a Jira instance. I need to get these two separate pairs of Confluence/Jira instances merged into one pair without losing any linking. How do I do this?

[Ryan Gross (Equip) · Accepted solution]

In general, your best option is going to be to export the projects/pages from your source JIRA/Confluence, and then importing these projects/spaces into your target JIRA/Confluence. However, you'll need to make sure both instances of JIRA & Confluence are on the same versions, otherwise you'll likely run into issues.

Here are some help docs on merging JIRA instances:
https://confluence.atlassian.com/jirakb/how-to-merge-jira-applications-instances-244352137.html
https://confluence.atlassian.com/adminjiraserver072/restoring-a-project-from-backup-828788097.html

And here's a previously answered question about merging Confluence instances:
https://answers.atlassian.com/questions/246479/merging-two-confluence-instances

Hope these help! 

[Anna McDonald]

Thank you for the resources. The scary part is the linking between JIRA and Confluence. I suppose we'll just have to test it and see what happens.

[Christine Charton]

Hi Anna,

We have the same question today : How to merge two Confluence/Jira instances into one without loosing links between both ? Did you get an answer or find a solution ?

[Ryan Gross (Equip)]

Hi Christine,

Just now seeing Anna asked me a follow-up, which I was not notified about... very sorry about that.

Internal links should be preserved just fine, so links between JIRA tickets for example should still work. Links between JIRA & Confluence are a different story, since those use the full URL instead of an internal ID.

I'm sure there are many ways to handle this, but off the top of my head two ways I can think of are:

1) When you run the backup of JIRA & Confluence, before you import them into the new environment, you can open the backup zip file and inside there open the entities.xml file for editing. Inside the entities.xml file, you can find & replace any mentions of the "old" address with the "new" address, and then run the import with the "new" addresses in place.

2) If you will still have access to the old address, you could set up a domain redirect to the new address, and have the redirect action carry over all text in the URL after the domain (so the redirection would basically replace the domain and leave the rest of the URL as it was)... assuming the project/space keys don't change on migration, in theory the URLs will be the same aside from the domain.

Couple quick notes, I always recommend testing these changes by importing into a development/staging environment before moving to your production environment. As well, I would not recommend either of these options unless you are comfortable making these changes. If you're not comfortable doing this yourself, you may want to seek assistance with an Atlassian Solution Partner in your area, as we generally will have the experience necessary to accomplish these changes and other issues that may come up during your migration.

Hope this helps!