I need help with upgrading Jira

[Markell Lambright]

I'm running Jira 7.1.9 Build 71013. I'd like to upgrade the Jira instance to the latest version as I believe this one has existing security threats/issues. My Jira instance is running in the cloud on a AWS EC2 instance. I've inherited the Jira admin role and not really sure what's the 1st thing I should do to perform this upgrade. Our instance has lots of data from the past years of use and I don't want to mess up or lose any of the data by botching the upgrade. Any suggestions would be great.

MLL

[Kerem Caglar [Solveka] · Accepted solution]

If I were you first of all I would create a clone of the EC2 instance and test the upgrade on that instance. 

You have to check the supported platforms doc especially for Java and database versions.

You have to go through all upgrade docs one by one and find out if you can directly upgrade to the desired target version or not. You might have to first upgrade to an interim version and then do another upgrade for the target version.

[Dave Theodore [Coyote Creek Consulting] · Accepted solution]

Don't do anything live in production for the first time. Always test first!

Atlassian has a pretty good doc that goes over the high points. You also need to evaluate the Apps that you have installed to see if all are available on the version you want to go to.  You should also check the Supported Platforms page for 7.1 that you're running now and compare that with the version you want to go to, say 8.11, for example. You may need to upgrade your database version along with the application. If you use the installer you will get the new Java version, but if you upgrade with the Standalone version, you will need to upgrade Java manually. Good luck!