Jira Sandbox - Why is it gone ? Do you miss it ?

[Thomas Schlegel]

Hi all,

it's no real question, but perhaps the beginning of a little discussion.

I'm really missing the Jira Sandbox. It was a fine thing to try the latest Jira version and some of the features we might not have yet in our instance. Nobody really wanted to work with the sandbox, but I used it sometimes to look at the latest version of Jira.

Atlassian says now, I should create my own sandbox by starting a free OnDemand trial, the sandbox has gone. But, the trial expires in 30 days and you have to cancel it and give your credit card number for the trial. If you don't cancel it, you will be charged 10 USD a month. And if you cancel the trial, can one start another trial the next time you wanted to try something in the latest version ? Do you really want to start one trial after another ? I don't and so I've lost my "try-something-out-instance".

We have a test instance of Jira, of course. But this test instance is not the latest version, it has the same version as our productive Jira. There we have to try some things before doing them in the productive environment. So it is no solution to install the latest version there.

Best regards

Thomas

[Andre Lehmann · Accepted solution]

Hi Thomas,

why not make an own Sandbox?
Just download the latest standalone and install it with hsql-database?
As licence you can use a developer-licence from your productive-system.

We also have a productive and a test-system (always the same version).
For evaluation I have an extra server (virtual machine) where I install the current version.

A nice side-effect for us: We give out all admin-logins to our users (so they have access to the operation-system and the application).
Thats nice, because they can "play" with new plugins or new functions there.
They also can install and test plugins they want to have in the productive system, just to evaluate them.

If someone "destroys" the installation, we just restore the vm from a snapshot and everything is ok again.

Kind regards.
André

[Thomas Schlegel]

Hi André,

thank you for your thoughts. An extra installation seems to be the only way. I did not know that it is possible to get more than one developer license. We have one already. I will try.

Of course it takes more time to install a new version now and then than just using an installation provided by Atlassian...

Best regards

Thomas

[JamieA]

It's a bit of a pain, but using the SDK it should not be much more than changing the version number in the pom, and running atlas-run. And waiting while an area of internet the size of Ireland gets downloaded.

[Deleted user]

Rather than change the version in the pom file you can also just run the command (using the SDK):

atlas-run-standalone --product jira --version x.x.x

Example:

atlas-run-standalone --product jira --version 5.2.8

[Rob Horan]

Why?  Because it requires:

• A server
• Time to dedicate towards setting up
• The ability to figure out what could have gone wrong and fix it if things aren't 100%